Longtime best friends Conrad and Mike do everything together: They “ate together / Read together / Played together...” Until Victor joins their class. Their new, big, bold schoolmate brags and blabs and excels at just about everything he tries. As Conrad puts it, “He—is—awesome!” Pretty soon, it’s Conrad and Victor who “walked together / Ate together / Played together— / No room for Mike.” Huliska-Beith tackles this age-old psychodrama with bright, textured illustrations that incorporate Victor’s incessant, pervasive boasting: “Me, Me, Me...Wow, Wow, Wow...Blah, Blah, Blah” swirls around him, Joe Cool sunglasses marking him as the grandstander he is. Environmental print—written details on the blackboard or book titles—adds fizz. A showdown game of kickball convinces Conrad and Mike that winning or losing has nothing to do with being best friends and that loyalty is its own reward. While there’s little new in this insight, the message bears repeating, and the delivery in this volume provides plenty of zing. The ending “high five” says it all. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-545-01023-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At her best, Rylant’s (The Ticky-Tacky Doll, below, etc.) sweetness and sentiment fills the heart; in this outing, however, sentimentality reigns and the end result is pretty gooey. Pandora keeps a lighthouse: her destiny is to protect ships at sea. She’s lonely, but loves her work. She rescues Seabold and heals his broken leg, and he stays on to mend his shipwrecked boat. This wouldn’t be so bad but Pandora’s a cat and Seabold a dog, although they are anthropomorphized to the max. Then the duo rescue three siblings—mice!—and make a family together, although Rylant is careful to note that Pandora and Seabold each have their own room. Choosing what you love, caring for others, making a family out of love, it is all very well, but this capsizes into silliness. Formatted to look like the start of a new series. Oh, dear. (Fiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-84880-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A surprisingly nuanced lesson set in confidence-building, easy-to-decode text.
A unicorn learns a friendship lesson in this chapter-book series opener.
Unicorn Bo has friends but longs for a “bestie.” Luckily, a new unicorn pops into existence (literally: Unicorns appear on especially starry nights) and joins Bo at the Sparklegrove School for Unicorns, where they study things like unicorn magic. Each unicorn has a special power; Bo’s is granting wishes. Not knowing what his own might be distresses new unicorn Sunny. When the week’s assignment is to earn a patch by using their unicorn powers to help someone, Bo hopes Sunny will wish to know Bo's power (enabling both unicorns to complete the task, and besides, Bo enjoys Sunny’s company and wants to help him). But when the words come out wrong, Sunny thinks Bo was feigning friendship to get to grant a wish and earn a patch, setting up a fairly sophisticated conflict. Bo makes things up to Sunny, and then—with the unicorns friends again and no longer trying to force their powers—arising circumstances enable them to earn their patches. The cheerful illustrations feature a sherbet palette, using patterns for texture; on busy pages with background colors similar to the characters’ color schemes, this combines with the absence of outlines to make discerning some individual characters a challenge. The format, familiar to readers of Elliott’s Owl Diaries series, uses large print and speech bubbles to keep pages to a manageable amount of text.
A surprisingly nuanced lesson set in confidence-building, easy-to-decode text. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-32332-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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