A good summer read.
When Abby Feingold’s family starts a resort, she learns about the wildlife of their new island home.
When Abby’s father married her stepmother, Rachel, Rachel’s great-aunt gifted the couple a private island in the Florida Keys. Naturally, the couple promptly quit their jobs to run a small resort. Abby quickly befriends one of the first guests, Bella Garcia, but soon Bella starts to withdraw, hurting Abby’s feelings. When Abby follows Bella, she learns Bella’s secret—a colorful bird has led Bella to a cove where a pod of dolphins lives. Bella swears Abby to secrecy about the cove, and the girls name the dolphins. Although the text gives lip service to the fact that dolphins are wild animals, that doesn’t stop the girls for long from swimming with them. When Abby overhears her parents’ concerns that their resort may not attract enough guests to stay viable, she blurts out the dolphin secret—at the cost of her friendship with Bella. The realistic characters will make it easy for readers to vicariously experience this semiwild private tropical paradise—the setting is the book’s biggest treasure. Abby and her father present as white; Rachel (with whom Abby has a delightfully close relationship) is black, with Jamaican heritage; Bella is Latina. The resort’s cook, Sofia, is Cuban, and Sofia’s nephew becomes a recurring character, as does Bella; Volume 2, Lost in the Storm, publishes simultaneously.
A good summer read. (Fiction. 7-10)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-29018-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Handsomely turned out, as can be expected…but Pinkney himself notes that he studied over 20 illustrated editions of the...
A retold but intact version of the familiar tale, given the customary early-18th-century setting in illustrations crowded with figures and period detail.
Pinkney retells the tale in plain, measured language: “ ‘Have some boots made for me,’ [the cat] said, ‘and give me a strong sack with a drawstring. I just might be able to help you find your fortune.’ ” With a few minor changes or additions (the ogre, for instance, is a “rich and evil sorcerer” depicted as human), the story puts passive young Benjamin into the paws of a feline impresario who orchestrates his rise to fame, fortune and a royal wedding to the equally inert Princess Daniella. Identified in the author’s afterword as a “black-and-white silver-tabby British shorthair,” the cat cuts a properly self-confident, swashbuckling figure as he inserts himself into a claustrophobically populous royal entourage bursting with sumptuously patterned silks, floating ribbons, airy plumage and ruffles. He goes on to trick the sorcerer in a confrontation (depicted in part in an awkwardly placed gatefold) and to become prime minister. Nor are his adventures over, as a nautical scene on the rear endpaper hints.
Handsomely turned out, as can be expected…but Pinkney himself notes that he studied over 20 illustrated editions of the story before producing one of his own, and he offers nothing particularly fresh. (Picture book/folk tale. 7-10)Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8037-1642-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
A welcome canine entry in the metajournal genre.
Nothing’s better than a grilled burger on a hot summer day in Picasso Park, but how’s a pack of mutts going to get some?
Stick Dog (so named not because he loves sticks—though he does—but because narrator Tom can only draw him like a stick figure) lives in an empty pipe under Highway 16. He and his friends—Poo-Poo the poodle, Stripes the Dalmatian, Karen the dachshund and Mutt the…well, mutt—are all hungry, and they smell burgers on the grill in a nearby park. They race over…OK, their race is interrupted by Poo-Poo’s obsessive hatred of squirrels…and find a family grilling. Each pup puts forth a plan to nab the burgers. Biting ankles? No. Stealing their car? No. Cliff diving? Uh, no. Stick Dog has a brilliant burger-snitching plan, but things don’t go exactly as planned. Watson’s retelling and extension of his self-published Stick Dog adventure, re-illustrated by Long, is full of silly, slapstick doggy humor. Stick Dog is slightly smarter than his eminently distractible ADHD canine pals, and young readers or listeners will enjoy his repeated use of reverse psychology to get them where they need to be. Three to four sentences in large type on fake notebook paper with ample stick drawings make this an enticing package for those just starting chapter books.
A welcome canine entry in the metajournal genre. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 7-10)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-211078-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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