Would that every student could find a way to combine what they love with their schoolwork.
A vampire who loves to skateboard has to up his game to convince his classmates and teacher that skateboarding can be spooky.
Vlad attends Miss Fussbucket’s School for Aspiring Spooks, which has a very diverse student body that includes a cyclops, a demon, a siren, and an anthropomorphic black cat in addition to other young ghouls and vampire Vlad. None of them share Vlad’s enthusiasm for skateboarding (they call him “Bad Vlad” the show-off), and Vlad just keeps racking up warnings from Miss Fussbucket about skateboarding at school until he earns a detention. As he writes lines on the chalkboard, he wonders why he can’t combine the two things he’s good at to please Miss Fussbucket. Well, the opportunity to do just that comes during the field trip to the natural history museum. Vlad sees the curving backbone of the giant dinosaur skeleton and just can’t resist—and the trick, combined with his screeching and hissing, sends the human museumgoers running away in fright, his classmates and teacher applauding him for being “radically terrifying.” Moldy green with highlights of red and the hot pink of Vlad’s skateboard pop against the more sedate backgrounds of the extremely staid school and pages of negative space. Readers will enjoy the prim-and-proper uniform-clad child monsters.
Would that every student could find a way to combine what they love with their schoolwork. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-553-51345-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
All-in-good-fun Halloween scares.
In NSYNC singer Bass’ debut picture book, trick-or-treaters follow their fearless leader down Scary Street in search of sweets, or so they think.
On Halloween night, a mischievous child dressed as a wolf, reminiscent of Max from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963), leads a large, racially diverse group of costumed children down Scary Street. The youngster, who narrates, proceeds to bring them to a series of creepy fun house–style homes, including a mansion belonging to a menacingly dapper vampire, who offers “toothy snacks” to the terrified-looking trick-or-treaters, and a gingerbread cottage inhabited by a Cruella de Vil–esque witch, who might prefer to bake little children into her house rather than give them treats. Uh-oh. Now there are only four children following the increasingly unreliable narrator, who ominously repeats, “No tricks allowed, just tasty treats.” As it turns out, the narrator does have a trick in store, which completes the scare and brings the story to a happy conclusion. Bass uses a simple, sometimes uneven rhyme pattern that ranges from interesting combinations (missed is rhymed with resist) to more familiar ones (treats/sweets) with a dash of tongue-in-cheek humor. Garrigue’s atmospheric illustrations have a Coney Island sideshow vibe, created with a candy palette that’s both invitingly tasty and garish in just the right way. The narrator, the vampire, and the witch are light-skinned.
All-in-good-fun Halloween scares. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781454952176
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Union Square Kids
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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