A friendship tale that deserves to leap immediately to the beginning-reader classics shelf.
Cherished headgear spurs adventure for a pair of elephants.
Olive gifts Oscar a hat. A tan number with a black band, it immediately earns the titular description. As two friends take a trip to the beach (cut short by rain), head to the grocery store, and bake a cake, the hat reveals surprising new functions. It serves as beachwear, but it’s also an impromptu shovel, umbrella, and grocery sack. Then it falls into the cake batter! Olive, whose confident suggestions haven’t faltered all day, now announces calmly that the hat can be washed. It can’t, and Oscar sadly sports the warped-looking cap. But Oscar recognizes that a day with Olive is better even than a favorite hat. And the pals share the splendid cake. Rosenthal’s depictions of the pachyderms and their surroundings are simple and firmly outlined. Olive is stylish in a pink polka-dot dress and a two-piece bathing suit; Oscar wears bright shorts and T-shirts. Olive’s large-type, serif-text dialogue is foregrounded in peach, Oscar’s in orange. Bernstein wrings maximum meaning out of a strict economy of text, resulting in a tale simple enough for youngsters to read independently but still satisfying. In few words, each friend is deftly characterized: Oscar is a bit slow on the uptake (asking where the hat is while wearing it) but at the end turns out to be perceptive and sweet. Olive is supportive and managerial.
A friendship tale that deserves to leap immediately to the beginning-reader classics shelf. (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781665975094
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon Spotlight
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
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