With a connection between plot and pictures that's often fitful, this patchy star vehicle is more likely to confuse than amuse. Read full book review >
Fifteen traditional limericks and other nonsense rhymes, plus five in the same spirit by the late illustrator ("Antoinette Leach came in from the beach/with a lobster asleep in her curls..."), each visualized in fairly literal fashion, without many of the witty graphic embroideries at which Marshall was so adept. Read full book review >
Eight more merry, interrelated tales of mishap and just deserts for readers of Rats On the Roof: unpleasant surprises await both housekeeper "Miss Mouse," who discovers that her new employer is a cat, and (in the title story) the vacationing Waldo Rat family when they find out that their dude ranch is run by rat terriers; Pig speeds around town in a yellow sports car until he learns the hard way that the bridge is out over Gopher's Gulch; and he just can't seem to hold onto a job—not even as local TV weatherpig. Read full book review >
To an adult mourning Marshall's passing, there's a bittersweet irony to these tales of the unquenchable Fox, whose self-confidence lands him in one pickle after another; each cloud that eclipses Fox here has a silver lining. Read full book review >
In his seventh appearance, Fox—always a bit too clever for his own good—gets three more just deserts: when he cheats by using little sister Louise as the engine of his homemade race car; when a neighbor gleefully absconds with the beloved comics he has mendaciously disparaged; and when Louise, abandoned in her Halloween pumpkin costume by the older kids, renders some delightfully novel and appropriate poetic justice. Read full book review >
Irrepressible "cut-ups" Spud and Joe abandon their game of car crash to try to get a video of themselves in old enemy Principal Lamar J. Spurgle's new red convertible. Read full book review >
These familiar, hilarious verses concern an enfant so terrible that she eats up the bear that plans to eat her, gives her physician the perfect comeuppance ("She took those pills from the pill concocter /And Isabel calmly cured the doctor"), and triumphs over other "bugaboos," including a bad dream. Read full book review >
The author-illustrator of a fine array of comical easy readers, picture books, and creatively retold nursery tales adopts a new genre. With irreverent spoofs of contemporary themes, offbeat humor, snappy dialogue, and delightful plot twists, these seven brief animal stories are vintage Marshall. Read full book review >
Marshall doesn't retell this old favorite, as he did in his revisionary nursery tales (Red Riding Hood, 1987); he uses it as springboard for a series of outrageously risible illustrations of the jowly old lady and her jowly pet frequenting imaginatively conceived shops or cozily at home, reading The Daily Drool or engaged in other industrious or self-indulgent pursuits. Read full book review >
