A good choice for reluctant sleepers and their tired parents—though if it backfires, don’t blame the creators.
Ouchchy takes a common parental issue—children who don’t want to go to sleep—and situates it in a groundhog burrow on the eve of winter.
Little Tess may not want to hibernate, but her yawning parents surely do. Before they can rest, though, they need to get Tess to bed. The usual get-kids-to-sleep methods are prominently featured—tucking the little one in, reading stories, offering warm beverages, singing lullabies. Tess uses familiar excuses—she’s not tired, her toys need her, there’s too much to do to sleep. In the end, her parents’ reverse psychology seems to do the trick: You stay up, Tess. We’re going to bed. Tess thoughtfully tucks Mommy and Daddy in before the inevitable yawns and heavy eyelids make an appearance, and she finally succumbs. But will Tess’ hibernation procrastination mean she’ll miss Groundhog Day? Parents and children alike will find their book counterparts thoroughly relatable. Cleverly, the rhyming verses can serve to either excite or soothe little listeners, depending on how they’re read aloud (and how much oomph adults put into the sound effects). Kaduji’s groundhogs are wonderfully expressive, with the O of a mouth, characters’ downturned eyebrows, and (premature) parental high-fives speaking volumes. The relative lack of background details keeps the focus on the family.
A good choice for reluctant sleepers and their tired parents—though if it backfires, don’t blame the creators. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781250903228
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories.
Kids know vegetables can be scary, but rarely are edible roots out to get someone. In this whimsical mock-horror tale, carrots nearly frighten the whiskers off Jasper Rabbit, an interloper at Crackenhopper Field.
Jasper loves carrots, especially those “free for the taking.” He pulls some in the morning, yanks out a few in the afternoon, and comes again at night to rip out more. Reynolds builds delicious suspense with succinct language that allows understatements to be fully exploited in Brown’s hilarious illustrations. The cartoon pictures, executed in pencil and then digitally colored, are in various shades of gray and serve as a perfectly gloomy backdrop for the vegetables’ eerie orange on each page. “Jasper couldn’t get enough carrots … / … until they started following him.” The plot intensifies as Jasper not only begins to hear the veggies nearby, but also begins to see them everywhere. Initially, young readers will wonder if this is all a product of Jasper’s imagination. Was it a few snarling carrots or just some bathing items peeking out from behind the shower curtain? The ending truly satisfies both readers and the book’s characters alike. And a lesson on greed goes down like honey instead of a forkful of spinach.
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-0297-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Chilling in the best ways.
When a young rabbit who’s struggling in school finds a helpful crayon, everything is suddenly perfect—until it isn’t.
Jasper is flunking everything except art and is desperate for help when he finds the crayon. “Purple. Pointy…perfect”—and alive. When Jasper watches TV instead of studying, he misspells every word on his spelling test, but the crayon seems to know the answers, and when he uses the crayon to write, he can spell them all. When he faces a math quiz after skipping his homework, the crayon aces it for him. Jasper is only a little creeped out until the crayon changes his art—the one area where Jasper excels—into something better. As guilt-ridden Jasper receives accolade after accolade for grades and work that aren’t his, the crayon becomes more and more possessive of Jasper’s attention and affection, and it is only when Jasper cannot take it anymore that he discovers just what he’s gotten himself into. Reynolds’ text might as well be a Rod Serling monologue for its perfectly paced foreboding and unsettling tension, both gentled by lightly ominous humor. Brown goes all in to match with a grayscale palette for everything but the purple crayon—a callback to black-and-white sci-fi thrillers as much as a visual cue for nascent horror readers. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Chilling in the best ways. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6588-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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