Food puns may not be forgivable, but this book makes a surprisingly strong defense.
A pun is almost always dangerous.
Nearly every name in this picture book populated by breads (both raised and flat) is a play on words. Some of them will make readers feel clever. The main character is Alfie Koman, and his best friend is Challah Looyah, which will amuse anyone who loves Jewish holiday food. Classmates Naan-cy and Cornelius Tortilla provide additional overt ethnic diversity but maybe not many chuckles, and naming a charred piece of bread Burnie Toast is questionable at best. The class bully is called Loaf, which is barely a joke at all. The visual humor is more successful. The talking challah, for example, has braided hair. It seems very apt—whether it’s meant as a joke or not—that Loaf is shaped like the tablets that contain the Ten Commandments. (In the pictures, Moses and most of the Israelites are depicted as human and appear to be White.) Alfie spends most of the book trying to tell the Passover story to his classmates, but Loaf keeps interrupting. This leads to some wonderfully stupid jokes. The ruler of Egypt, Loaf says, is a giant insect named Pha-Roach, and according to him, the 10 plagues include “Birthday Clowns” and “Indoor Recess Forever.” The book turns briefly serious when Alfie finally stands up to the bully (yelling, “LET MY STORY GO!”) and tells “the REAL Passover story.” This leads to an inspiring moral about bravery and friendship, but many readers won’t mind the lesson, because it’s both genuinely moving and a relief from the puns. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.5-by-19-inch double-page spreads viewed at 90.2% of actual size.)
Food puns may not be forgivable, but this book makes a surprisingly strong defense. (glossary) (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-11811-5
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
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