Matched to a hard-to-top title, Joosse’s (Ghost Trap, 1998, etc.) fourth neighborhood mystery featuring Wild Willie, with fellow junior detectives Kyle and Lucy, centers on puzzling changes of behavior in both a local bully and a parrot. It all begins when mean Chuckie Herman starts hanging around outside Lucy’s house, cleaned up, exuding cologne, making friendly conversation—in other words, showing every sign that his brain has been fried by aliens. Then Kyle’s parrot Scarface takes to making funny noises, and throwing up in Kyle’s hand. Aliens again? A trip to the vet, some clue-gathering, and consultation with adults suggests another possibility: love. Wielding pen and brush with characteristic vigor, Truesdell captures the detectives’ bug-eyed bafflement in a generous set of vignettes and larger sketches. As it turns out, Scarface is indeed expressing avian infatuation, and a more experienced cousin’s reassurance—“Love sorta rumbles around for a while. And then it passes. Like gas”—proves true for Chuckie, who reverts to his nasty old self in the end. Bright with high comedy and low, this unabashed ribtickler will find plenty of reluctant readers among its many fans. (Fiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-395-68964-3
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
A bookish child almost misses seeing her favorite writer in the whole wide world, in a wish-fulfillment tale that will turn any author groupie (or author, for that matter) green with envy. Janey’s wild to meet Lily May Appleton at a local college’s literary festival, but she gets so absorbed in reading Appleton’s latest animal mystery while other, less interesting authors make presentations, that she loses the rest of her class. Much later, having wandered desolately around the campus, she tearfully tells her tale of woe to an elderly passerby, who turns out to be. . . .well, you know. A long, pleasant give-and-take ensues, and Janey gets the entire bagful of books she brought signed before triumphantly rejoining her class at day’s end. Hahn tells the tale in present tense; Bush illustrates her brief chapters with full-page scenes of typical children encountering several affectionately spoofed author and illustrator types. A warm companion to Louise Borden’s The Day Eddie Met the Author (2001) or Eve Bunting’s My Special Day at Third Street School (2004). (Fiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-35408-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For his newest exercise in math without tears—unless you count tears of laughter—Schwartz invites readers to imagine how much food a dog the size of a T. rex would eat, how big the Earth would be if the Moon were a marble, how long a tongue would be if taste buds were as big as rose buds and similar ramifications for germs the size of gerbils, hair as thick as spaghetti, kayaks the size of cruise ships, a submarine sandwich as big as a submarine and more. If his comparisons don’t have readers rolling in the aisles, Warhola’s literal visualizations—from a skateboarder zooming down a ramp-like tongue to a humongous mole (as in “molehill”) towering over the Empire State Building, meatballs as big as bowling balls and a chocolate bar with blimp-sized almonds melting messily over a shopping mall—definitely will. And, to prove that it’s not all just free-range imagining, Schwartz closes with actual numbers, step-by-step calculations, notes on iffy assumptions (for instance, a 14,000 pound dog would eat a lot, but not 350 times as much as a 40 pound one) and related problems to solve. Math didn’t used to be this much fun—it’s almost unfair. (Picture book/nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-439-67612-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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