All the ingredients for fun and healthy cooking and feasting.
The Willemses rescue “slop” from its unfortunate tech associations.
Donning toques and aprons and relying on their inimitable cartoon-bubble chat, Elephant and Piggie welcome younger readers. Recipe entries offer historical info (French toast didn’t originate in France!) and frequent reminders to seek help from adults. Piggie’s extended family (plus Gerald’s ancient mammoth Great-Great-Uncle Maurice) pitch in to oversee chapters: Pearl-wearing Auntie Pearl presents breakfast ideas; Uncle Stew the Smorgasboar supervises snacks; second cousin Suzie Sous Chef suggests soups, stews, and salads; third cousin Irvine Fine Dine Van Swine covers the main courses. Maurice handles desserts, which include cakes, puddings, Popsicles, and popcorn. Each recipe is carefully labeled with the appropriate abbreviation (gluten-free, vegan, nut-free, vegetarian) and given a naming boost: “Cha-cha-cha Chia Pudding,” “Humdinger Hummus,” and “Hooray, Yogurt Parfait!” Preparation ranges from simple (the aforementioned hummus, grain bowls) to fairly complex, like “Chicken Mole Hurray,” but ingredients are available year-round and are easily sourced. Dishes like Arabic shakshuka, Italian minestrone, Dutch stamppot, and Brazilian fish stew cater to global tastes. Among other helpful inclusions: a list of common culinary staples, kitchen equipment, basic skills (dicing an onion, cracking an egg), safety rules, and cooking terms. A generous helping of puns and Pigeon cameos—as well as childlike Gerald’s hilarious antics—ensure this one will appeal to all. The color photos are mouthwatering, the instructions are clear, and the enthusiasm is contagious.
All the ingredients for fun and healthy cooking and feasting. (index) (Illustrated cookbook. 5-12)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781454963189
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Union Square Kids
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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