Offers entertainment and will likely whet appetites for s’mores, but lacks clarity.
In this debut illustrated children’s book, a bad French fry causes trouble in a land of fun, delicious food.
In Fun Food Land, locals enjoy stopping by the Poutine Café, where French-E-Fry is owner and chef. Not only is the food great, it’s also free. The chef has Fry Friends who live under his protective hat (a beret, of course), who help him remember recipes and propose new ones. But one day, the chef tells Miss Cupcake about his suggestion for a new dessert: s’mores! The recipe starts with capturing some marshmallows when they aren’t looking, then melting them, drizzling them with chocolate, sandwiching them between graham crackers…and eating them. Horrified, Miss Cupcake hurries to warn Mr. and Mrs. Marshmallow, who panic and run, leaving a sticky trail behind. At the café, a regular called Pops discovers the truth: a rotten potato named Larry has somehow infiltrated the Fry Friends under the chef’s beret. Larry comes from a bad neighborhood, Junk Food Land, where the “unhappy packaged foods with bad attitudes live,” and he wants to plant “French-E-Fry’s head with many Fun Food Land residents as main ingredients!” Pops and Miss Cupcake come up with a cunning plan to foil Larry, and everyone celebrates at the end with marshmallow hugs and free poutine. The logic of Joelle’s and Beaupre’s tale doesn’t make much sense: how does the chef consist of being a container of fries, which are also independent beings? And if it’s horrifying to eat marshmallows, why not French fries, the main ingredient in poutine? Poutine (non-Canadian parents may need to explain the reference) is greasy-spoon fare. Residents of Fun Food Land include the Marshmallows, Miss Cupcake, Danny Donut, and Hamburger Harold, who hardly make a strong contrast to the denizens of Junk Food Land. And it’s a little odd to make s’mores, that campfire favorite, an object of horror. These difficulties aside, the book is amusing, with an exciting story of danger averted through cooperation, planning, and daring. Joelle’s illustrations are dynamic, colorful, and expressive, helping to tell the story.
Offers entertainment and will likely whet appetites for s’mores, but lacks clarity.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 28
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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