There are a few clever ideas in this series, but many of the added verses and the repetitive art feel forced to fit the...
The famed Mother Goose arachnophobe finds her picnic pilfered by various animals in this expanded adaptation.
The tale starts off with the familiar rhyme, but the next six verses switch things up a bit with a bird pecking at her curd, a parrot crunching her carrot, a bear gobbling her pear and so forth. Each time, Miss Muffet, a curly-haired Caucasian tyke wearing blue overalls, is frightened away. On the last page, she decides to stay when each of the previously offending critters brings her a snack. One die-cut hole is added to each subsequent right-hand page to reveal the new animal’s arrival, and on the left-hand page, the holes reveal the animal’s eating noises (“Gobble! Gobble!” or “Chew! Chew!”). While the cartoon Miss Muffet and animal visitors are playful enough against sunny-colored solid backgrounds, the art starts to look monotonous as the image of Miss Muffet fleeing the scene is repeated on each page. The new rhymes featuring poodles eating noodles and mice munching rice work well, but others in the Classic Books with Holes series are not as fortunate with their texts. In Itsy Bitsy Spider, the die-cut holes reveal additional spiders climbing on other parts of a house and yard; Itchy Nitchy scales the window box and Oochy Koochy ascends the apple tree in amateurish cartoons. In Hickory Dickory Dock, the page turns and die-cut holes spotlight further creatures scampering up the clock, such as a snake, a crab and a frog, as the hours grow late. The word choices in each stanza are clearly contrived to suit the scheme, and several of the creatures climbing the clock, particularly the sheep, bear and dog, are out of scale with one another and look odd in their clock-mounting attempts. In Mary Had a Little Lamb, the holes expose a total of seven lambs that follow the sheep-loving heroine around in all sorts of weather. While this book also has a few awkward rhymes, it does include some nicely diverse images. Mary’s class is multiethnic, and one member of her dance class uses a wheelchair. Music notation for each classic tune is included on the back of each book.
There are a few clever ideas in this series, but many of the added verses and the repetitive art feel forced to fit the die-cut-hole gimmick. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-84643-511-9
Page Count: 14
Publisher: Child's Play
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Useful for sharing with gardening grandmas but not essential.
An ideal day in an idealized garden with a doting grandma.
“Every Sunday, Mommy and Daddy take me to Nana’s garden,” proclaims a smiling, brown-haired child wearing turquoise boots, a yellow sundress, and a flower-adorned hat. On subsequent pages, child and blue jeans–clad grandmother, shaded by her own sun hat, gather tomatoes and basil, chase butterflies, catch bugs, pick flowers, and water plants. Though the book is not directly instructional, six colors are highlighted in colored type, and the girl counts flowers and rocks as she collects them. The child’s grandfather (gray haired but still rather young looking) is a peripheral character, glimpsed working in his workshop and helping with the watering. Illustrator De Luca’s fanciful illustrations display her animation experience, pink leaves on a willow tree edging the book toward fantasy. Caterpillars and adult insects smile throughout, even when pent-up in jars, some of which, distressingly, have no visible air holes. (Sharp-eyed readers will also note that the word “brown” is not set in colored type—a small but distracting detail.) Nana presents white, as do the child’s grandfather and father; the child’s mother and the child both have beige skin a smidge darker.
Useful for sharing with gardening grandmas but not essential. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-949998-98-6
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Clever Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Over rhyming captions that only occasionally exceed three or four words, Stockdale presents painted portraits of 21 wild birds. Portrayed in a flat graphic style and, mostly, in frozen motion against simplified natural settings, each—from great horned owl and blue-footed booby to Adelie penguin, ostrich and broad-tailed hummingbird—is large and easily visible on the page, rendered with clear hues and sharp color borders likely to draw and hold the attention even of unfledged young viewers. The images are often mesmerizing in their abstraction, inviting readers to pause and admire. A flock of red-billed oxpeckers is arrayed on a slope that readers may take a few beats to recognize as the neck of a giraffe; the white-tailed ptarmigans look at first like just a few snowdrifts. The author links her gallery together with the concluding note that “Dull or dazzling colors, / long or little legs. / All of them have feathers, / and all are hatched from eggs,” then identifies each bird in a closing key with one or two sentences of descriptive commentary. Broader in geographical range and even simpler in design, this makes a natural follow-up to Lois Ehlert’s Feathers for Lunch (1990) as a primary introduction to our avian cousins. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 2-4)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56145-560-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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