In three short chapters of just a few words each, Lobel demonstrates her artistry for choosing the right ingredients to create a perfect concept book around the life of a small gray-striped cat. “All Week Long,” the first story or chapter, presents not only the days of the week, but also colors, and in the process, accomplishes a fine assessment of one little girl's activities by focusing, cat’s-eye view, on her footwear. Tuesday's flashy red cowboy boots take her bike-riding, and Saturday’s demure pink toe shoes inspire Nini, the cat, to lift an elegant paw and so on. The second segment, “Nini's Year,” evokes much more about months than simply their names, even during March, when the howling winds Nini listens to wouldn't seem to give an ordinary artist much to go on visually. The surprise here is the Nini of December, who “waited for good things,” and proudly accepts her holiday gifts—three gray-striped kittens. The titular third story may seem a book-bulking appendage or a pretext for including number concepts, but it is also the necessary expansion of Nini's world, for she is a cat of the outdoors. Here her presence is diminished so that sometimes only a head peeps from the edges of white-framed illustrations depicting life around her home near a lighthouse. The book's culminating spread shows one moon smiling at a 100-starred cat constellation above a very tiny cat. There's neither a missing elementary concept nor a jarring fly in the ointment of this bewitching cat's charmed life. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: April 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15539-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The pig family is gathering for its annual picnic, to which each member brings a different food: ``Auntie Anne made apple pie./Ben brought beans from Boston./Cousin Cabe baked carrot cake./Some dates arrived with Dustin.'' The uppercase and lowercase forms of each letter appear in the top outer corner of its page; the challenge is to find all the letter's uses in the alliterative text. X, as usual, is the spoiler: ``Max brought extra jelly.'' Miranda (Does a Mouse Have a House?, 1994, etc.) uses the last page to display a list of all the letters and their corresponding foods. The fun is in the pastel-colored illustrations: Each of the quirkily attired, bipedal pigs is distinctive, and fans of Audrey Woods's Horrible Holidays (1988) will already know what Hoffman can do with a gathering of eccentrics. Here the backgrounds become progressively more crowded and antic; readers can follow the trials of Fern, who is trying to keep the lid on ``fifty fish'' she's frying, or savor visual puns—Karl's kumquat mousse appears to be garnished with a moose antler. There have been other alliterative alphabets keyed to cuisine (Crescent Dragonwagon's Alligator Arrived with Apples, 1987; Anne Shelby's Potluck, 1991); if this one isn't a great abecedarium, it is a terrific ``pignic'' book. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56397-558-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
This color-concept book from newcomer Asbury has much going for it. The spare text (``I am Bonnie and this is my cat, Bluebonnet'') and the two-color illustrations (black and blue on a bed of white) are simple, direct, and oddly comforting. Bonnie recounts a day in her life: She introduces readers to her home, cavorts with her pals in a tree fort and swimming pool, sups, watches TV, reads her dad a bedtime story. For the most part, Asbury has chosen the vehicles for his color with a nod toward familiarity—blue water, blueberry pie, blue eyes (small, ghoulish buttons)—and sometimes with real invention: the flicker of the cathode ray, the glow of moonlight. The blue tree, on the other hand, is discordant. Two companion volumes, Rusty's Red Vacation (ISBN 0-8050-4021-8) and Yolanda's Yellow School (- 4023-4), take Asbury's color message aptly into those realms. (Picture book. 2-5)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8050-4022-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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