Bileck and Bryan capture the stuff of dreams in this mesmerizing and multifaceted pageant.
With echoes of Lear and Stevenson, this journey into the land of dreams pairs a detailed Old World setting with a pulsing four-beat rhythm to pull readers into its magical realm.
Bileck, illustrator of Julian Scheer’s Rain Makes Applesauce (1964), originally created these graphite-and–colored-pencil drawings for a children’s manuscript by Virginia Woolf. When her estate canceled the project, Bryan collaborated on a new text with his longtime friend. Masterful wordplay, alliteration, imagery, and rhyme contribute to this 29-stanza poem, printed in its entirety at the opening and then woven throughout the densely populated pages in a hand-printed text. Thimbledon Bridge “is a merry mile long. / No one can cross who is cross. / It boasts a moon quite enormously blown / By bubble-man, bassoonist, Peat Moss.” Spools, needles, and thimbles weave the emerging tapestry, both out of and “into the blue.” Pinwheels and performers, giraffes and camels, turrets and greenery unfold in a fantastical, surreal parade. The images are alternately richly saturated with color or rendered with such a pale line as to be slipping from sight. The seamstress/narrator appears at the beginning and conclusion as a benevolent figure, relaxing in a rocker. Inside she becomes the wild Wind-Witch, hoary and zombielike, in compositions as disturbing as the rest are delightful.
Bileck and Bryan capture the stuff of dreams in this mesmerizing and multifaceted pageant. (contributors’ notes) (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9793000-4-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Alazar Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the...
An all-zombie-all-the-time zombiefest, featuring a bunch of grade-school kids, including protagonist Stink and his happy comrades.
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the streets in the time-honored stiff-armed, stiff-legged fashion. McDonald signals her intent on page one: “Stink and Webster were playing Attack of the Knitting Needle Zombies when Fred Zombie’s eye fell off and rolled across the floor.” The farce is as broad as the Atlantic, with enough spookiness just below the surface to provide the all-important shivers. Accompanied by Reynolds’ drawings—dozens of scene-setting gems with good, creepy living dead—McDonald shapes chapters around zombie motifs: making zombie costumes, eating zombie fare at school, reading zombie books each other to reach the one-million-minutes-of-reading challenge. When the zombie walk happens, it delivers solid zombie awfulness. McDonald’s feel-good tone is deeply encouraging for readers to get up and do this for themselves because it looks like so much darned fun, while the sub-message—that reading grows “strong hearts and minds,” as well as teeth and bones—is enough of a vital interest to the story line to be taken at face value.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5692-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent.
Published in magazines, never seen since / Now resurrected for pleasure intense / Versified episodes numbering four / Featuring Marco, and Horton and more!
All of the entries in this follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (2011) involve a certain amount of sharp dealing. Horton carries a Kwuggerbug through crocodile-infested waters and up a steep mountain because “a deal is a deal”—and then is cheated out of his promised share of delicious Beezlenuts. Officer Pat heads off escalating, imagined disasters on Mulberry Street by clubbing a pesky gnat. Marco (originally met on that same Mulberry Street) concocts a baroque excuse for being late to school. In the closer, a smooth-talking Grinch (not the green sort) sells a gullible Hoobub a piece of string. In a lively introduction, uber-fan Charles D. Cohen (The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, 2002) provides publishing histories, places characters and settings in Seussian context, and offers insights into, for instance, the origin of “Grinch.” Along with predictably engaging wordplay—“He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. / But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum”—each tale features bright, crisply reproduced renditions of its original illustrations. Except for “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” which has been jammed into a single spread, the verses and pictures are laid out in spacious, visually appealing ways.
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-38298-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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