While difficult not to compare to Oliver Jeffers’ Stuck (2011), this crazy cast of characters certainly holds its own.
Cats get stuck in trees all the time, but how does a whole farm end up there?
It’s déjà moo. Millie the cow may have used her hiding abilities for not-so-honorable purposes in Millie Waits for the Mail (2007). However, instead of hiding and scaring the mail carrier, now she loves to play hide-and-seek with her barnyard pals. But when the chickens, pigs and goats take all the good hiding places, she needs to find the best one. So she scampers up a tree. This seems to be perfect—no one can find her—except climbing up is a lot easier than climbing down. Millie is stuck! After a number of failed solutions that include a catapult and a ladder, suddenly all the animals and the farmer are up in the tree with Millie. (Well, not the chickens. They are down below, munching on popcorn, enjoying the shenanigans.) Luckily, the promise of cake lures the mail carrier to the farm, and he comes up with a foolproof rescue plan. Now, if only they could figure out how to rescue the cake too....Steffensmeier brilliantly infuses illustrations with humorous details, this time with even more opportunity, given the expansive view from the treetop.
While difficult not to compare to Oliver Jeffers’ Stuck (2011), this crazy cast of characters certainly holds its own. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8027-3402-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chilling in the best ways.
When a young rabbit who’s struggling in school finds a helpful crayon, everything is suddenly perfect—until it isn’t.
Jasper is flunking everything except art and is desperate for help when he finds the crayon. “Purple. Pointy…perfect”—and alive. When Jasper watches TV instead of studying, he misspells every word on his spelling test, but the crayon seems to know the answers, and when he uses the crayon to write, he can spell them all. When he faces a math quiz after skipping his homework, the crayon aces it for him. Jasper is only a little creeped out until the crayon changes his art—the one area where Jasper excels—into something better. As guilt-ridden Jasper receives accolade after accolade for grades and work that aren’t his, the crayon becomes more and more possessive of Jasper’s attention and affection, and it is only when Jasper cannot take it anymore that he discovers just what he’s gotten himself into. Reynolds’ text might as well be a Rod Serling monologue for its perfectly paced foreboding and unsettling tension, both gentled by lightly ominous humor. Brown goes all in to match with a grayscale palette for everything but the purple crayon—a callback to black-and-white sci-fi thrillers as much as a visual cue for nascent horror readers. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Chilling in the best ways. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6588-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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