In her debut picture book, McGinty depicts a slumber party that takes a sleepless turn in a comical counting rhyme. “Good night, little lambs. / Go to sleep,” says the mother to the children tucked in bed and counting sheep. The rumpus begins when she leaves: “Ten little lambs who won’t go to sleep. / What will they do all night? / They’ll tackle and tumble, and wrestle and rumble. / Ten little lambs all night.” Rendered in soft pastel hues, Sweet’s (The Sky’s the Limit, p. 266, etc.) busy watercolor and colored-pencil illustrations depict the children (who have turned into lambs) laughing, bouncing, and swinging from the bedpost in a raucous pillow fight. Encouraging participation, McGinty’s text remains essentially unchanged as the story counts down, except for the description of the lamb’s activity. To wit, “Six little lambs who won’t go to sleep. / What will they do all night? / They’ll plow winding freeways through piles of pj’s. / Six little lambs all night.” Sweet adds an important element to the narrative by placing the additional sleeping lambs in circles across the bottom of the page. The formula presents many mathematical possibilities, including comparing the number of lambs asleep and awake and calculating different combinations that total 10. It all adds up to good fun. And as a bonus, little ones who’ve yet to experience the irony of the slumber party will get solid training in the stay-awake-at-all-costs ritual. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2596-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
Cataloging several examples for each of ten regular shapes, Greene develops in an ever-changing rhyme scheme the premise that all shapes are made from bent lines. It's an eye-opening insight for readers, but confusing when blocks are considered square, a bubble, marble, and ``curled kitten'' are included in the list of circles, and ``star'' is defined as ``the shape of a fish.'' Readers may also falter at the triangle spread, since the three blocks of text are placed so that it's hard to tell in what order they're to be read; the ``tent built just for you'' has a triangular opening, but what children will notice is the diamond- shaped side. Kaczman's picture-book debut features a set of stylized, evenly colored, very simply drawn scenes, sometimes viewed from playfully skewed angles or featuring sight gags—a police officer chowing down on a doughnut, a kilted man playing hopscotch. Still, an instructional intent hangs heavy over this, and the examples are not always on target; a better book on the topic is Dayle Ann Dodds's The Shape of Things (1994). (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-78606-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wide-eyed and grinning, 20 cars line up for a race—-and they’re off, burning rubber, swerving into walls and each other, shedding parts, crawling off the track with tongues hanging out. “Which car’s first across the line?/Hurrah! It’s driver number 9!” In illustrations created first on a computer, Murphy puts a wonderful range of expressions and vivid jellybean colors on his autos, but leaves crews, spectators, and vehicles floating just above the ground, and despite tidy sets of tire tracks and boldface “sound effects,” the cars have little sense of motion. While the book has some value for preschoolers as practice in number recognition, the static illustrations put it outside a winner’s circle that would include Thacher Hurd’s Zoom City (p. 197), Tres Seymour’s Smash-Up Crash-Up Derby (1995), or Donald Crews’s Bicycle Race (1985). (Picture book. 4-5)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-890515-07-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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