Hazen offers a good answer to the eternal question, as well as a delightfully monstrous cast. Little Harry is happy when his mother croons “Euuu, my cute little monster child, / I love the way you warm my wild”—and considerably less so when she pays more attention to big bro Bruxley or little sister Bronwen. Sitting with him on his bed slab after the inevitable tantrum, she fields his titular query by asking him which of his creepy beasties he likes best: Tiny, Slimy or Whiny? Then she tosses his answer—“I love each the most but not the same”—back at him. Kovalski adds icky details (Harry’s beasties are, for instance, a hedgehog, a slug and a bat respectively) to cozy subterranean settings featuring a stout, green-furred (one parent) family with a reptilian house pet and a revolting diet. Only the latest of several recent proofs that the long tradition of playing out familiar domestic issues with families of monsters is as active and effective as ever, this one is particularly well-imagined. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7868-1810-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
The poster boy for relentless mischief-makers everywhere, first encountered in No, David! (1998), gives his weary mother a rest by going to school. Naturally, he’s tardy, and that’s but the first in a long string of offenses—“Sit down, David! Keep your hands to yourself! PAY ATTENTION!”—that culminates in an afterschool stint. Children will, of course, recognize every line of the text and every one of David’s moves, and although he doesn’t exhibit the larger- than-life quality that made him a tall-tale anti-hero in his first appearance, his round-headed, gap-toothed enthusiasm is still endearing. For all his disruptive behavior, he shows not a trace of malice, and it’ll be easy for readers to want to encourage his further exploits. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48087-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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