It's a mess, riddled with typos, botched wording and grating sound cues. The moral here is obvious: The person who fails to...
Shoddy, sloppy and badly translated, this collection of five fables is as baffling as it is crude.
Apparently "[translated] from Ancient Greek" by Casanova into Italian and then translated into English, according to the credits page, this collection includes short, lightly animated versions of "The Fox and the Grapes," "The Grasshopper and the Ants," "The Lion and the Dolphin," "The Fox and the Crow" and "The Tortoise and the Hare." There's no voice narration, which is a blessing, given the clunky, near-indecipherable text that accompanies each story. The conclusion of "The Fox and the Grapes," for instance, offers this stunner of a garbled moral: "Those who do not succeed in realising their aims because they are not able to do so, often disdain that which they did not succeed in doing." Good luck parsing that one, kids. Most disturbingly, each tale of wretched animals in moral quandaries ends with a near-naked old man (Aesop, presumably) whom readers must dress in order to unlock the moral. The old man shows up five times in five separate states of partial nudity, leaving readers to wonder if he may have a serious problem. Even apart from these significant problems, the app also suffers from poor navigation, lackluster artwork and leaps of logic too big to ignore even for a fanciful children's app. For the record, lions and dolphins cannot shake hands.
It's a mess, riddled with typos, botched wording and grating sound cues. The moral here is obvious: The person who fails to steer clear of this app will find much to regret. (iPad storybook app. 3-6)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Progetto Rosetta
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
