A sometimes-rambling but ultimately sweet animal tale.
A goose and a bear develop a close friendship in this debut picture book.
As a Canadian goose named Zoey plays in the pond, she is approached by a large black bear called Henry. They become fast friends, spending their days swimming in the pond and playing together. But as wintertime approaches, they realize they must go their separate ways for the season; Zoey will fly south and Henry will hibernate. They make plans to meet again in the spring. When Henry wakes to a verdant landscape after his long nap, he wonders whether his friendship with Zoey was a dream. At the pond, he is thrilled to see Zoey waiting for him. Though the moral here is charming, the book is wordy for this genre. Some verbose descriptions could have been omitted without effecting the plot. Wald’s use of adjectives and adverbs in the dialogue feels clunky and redundant, especially when the characters’ emotions are already evident via the illustrations (“Zoey paused, and then asked in a somewhat fearful voice”; “Feeling greatly relieved, Zoey exclaimed”). But Hannon’s (No Bears Allowed, 2019, etc.) whimsical, soft watercolor images are appealing, capturing pretty nature scenes in different seasons and offering friendly animal portrayals. And the engaging work emphasizes its worthy message with a note on the back explaining that the story “celebrates diversity” and shows “how differences and obstacles can be overcome with…a willingness to discover what we have in common with others.”
A sometimes-rambling but ultimately sweet animal tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9857152-8-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Deeper Well Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Drawing again on her midwestern, Russian-American heritage, Polacco tells how Grandma comforts a child who is afraid of approaching thunder by distracting her with the making of a cake. It's from scratch—including getting eggs from the hens and an unusual ingredient, tomatoes, from the garden—but they get the cake done by the time the storm arrives. Polacco's illustrations—combining folk motifs, softly modeled faces, generous white space, and wonderfully evocative glimpses of the weather—are her best yet. There's a bit of poetic license in the countdown (sound travels one mile in five seconds, not five miles), but never mind. The cake recipe (with minimal instructions) is included. A heartwarming vignette.
Pub Date: March 15, 1990
ISBN: 0399222316
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
Superheroes, and readers, will live happily-ever-after.
Why have fairy tales lasted so long? Maybe it’s because they change with every teller.
It takes surprisingly little effort to turn the Three Little Pigs into superheroes. The Big Bad Wolf basically started out as a supervillain, with the ability to blow a house down, and the pigs had to perform spectacular feats to outwit him. In this picture book, the wolf, locked in the Happily Never After tower, devises a plot to escape. Using rotten eggs and spicy ginger, he creates the Gingerbread Man, who makes his way to a baking contest where the three pigs and other fairy-tale characters are competing to win the key to the city. The Gingerbread Man grabs the key, and not even superhero pigs are fast enough to catch him, but with their secret weapon—mustard (which one of the pigs also uses to bake cookies)—they save the day. The morals: Evil never triumphs, and mustard cookies are delicious. The book’s charm is in the details. There are splotches of mustard on the cookies featured on the endpapers, and a sly-looking mouse is hiding on many of the pages. The story even manages to include more than a dozen fairy-tale figures without seeming frenzied. Evans’ use of shading is so skillful that it almost seems possible to reach out and touch the characters. Most of the human characters are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Superheroes, and readers, will live happily-ever-after. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-68221-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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