Aesop’s fable gets a Northern Chinese setting in this stiffly formal version. As the ants, “mindful of the winter to come,” work “to secure their home against the impending cold and snow,” Grasshopper idly enjoys watching the activities of the Emperor and his court—and so is caught flat when the court suddenly moves away to its winter quarters, and the ants too disappear. The tale thereupon ends abruptly, with neither the moral nor Grasshopper’s fate made explicit. The illustrations are also sketchy, reduced to essentials. Though Poole (How The Rooster Got His Crown, 1999) sets this in the Imperial Summer Gardens, near which she lived for four years, backgrounds are suggested with, at most, a few brushstrokes. Similarly, patterns on the court’s robes are indistinct, as are the courtiers’ faces, and for a garden, the visible landscapes look surprisingly bare. Grasshopper himself is rendered in a stylized way, with a flexible, mantis-like neck, human eyes, and legs that seem to migrate along his body from scene to scene. Poole uses traditional Chinese brushes and techniques here, and judging from the visual result and the appended note seems more focused on the technical exercise than the story. Still, children will get the point, as well as a ground-level glimpse of a vanished way of life, and picture book versions of the fable are rare. (Picture book/folktale. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8234-1477-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, if not quite as seamless, alternative to Robert D. and Daniel San Souci’s Song of Sedna (1981).
A popular Inuit cautionary legend, featuring a haughty young woman and a gruesome climactic twist.
Arnaq will accept no suitor, until a shaman sea bird disguised as a handsome young man sweeps her away with glittering promises to a wretched, reeking tent on a distant shore. When her father arrives to rescue her, the shaman raises such a storm that her terrified dad casts her overboard—and cuts off her fingers to keep her from holding on to the boat. Those fingers are transformed into whales and seals, and she, into a testy spirit named Nuliajuq, who calls up storms on all who “disrespect the land or the sea.” This and other modern-sounding lines (“Eventually Arnaq succumbed to complete depression”) give the otherwise formal narrative a playfully anachronistic air that may or may not be intentional. Lim illustrates the tale in a realistic rather than stylized way, using flowing lines and brush strokes to depict natural settings, faces, Arnaq’s lustrous locks (and, though seen only from a distance, fingerless hands), and a range of accurately detailed arctic and sea animals. In an afterword, the author explains that the sea spirit goes by several regional names; a pronunciation guide to Inuktitut words in this version is also included.
A fresh, if not quite as seamless, alternative to Robert D. and Daniel San Souci’s Song of Sedna (1981). (Picture book/folk tale. 7-9)Pub Date: March 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-927095-75-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Inhabit Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book....
From funeral clown to cheese sculptor, a tally of atypical trades.
This free-wheeling survey, framed as a visit to “The Great Hall of Jobs,” is designed to shake readers loose from simplistic notions of the world of work. Labarre opens with a generic sculpture gallery of, as she puts it, “The Classics”—doctor, dancer, farmer, athlete, chef, and the like—but quickly moves on, arranging busy cartoon figures by the dozen in kaleidoscopic arrays, with pithy captions describing each occupation. As changes of pace she also tucks in occasional challenges to match select workers (Las Vegas wedding minister, “ethical” hacker, motion-capture actor) with their distinctive tools or outfits. The actual chances of becoming, say, the queen’s warden of the swans or a professional mattress jumper, not to mention the nitty-gritty of physical or academic qualifications, income levels, and career paths, are left largely unspecified…but along with noting that new jobs are being invented all the time (as, in the illustration, museum workers wheel in a “vlogger” statue), the author closes with the perennial insight that it’s essential to love what you do and the millennial one that there’s nothing wrong with repeatedly switching horses midstream. The many adult figures and the gaggle of children (one in a wheelchair) visiting the “Hall” are diverse of feature, sex, and skin color.
Chicken sexer? Breath odor evaluator? Cryptozoologist? Island caretaker? The choices dazzle! (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1219-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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