A rip-roaring, chuckle-inducing romp.
Four animals, two shapes, and six items equal exponential fun.
This Australian import starts out as a simple rhyming concept book but quickly transforms into a zany free-for-all. The action begins when a goat wearing a fez climbs up onto a box. This angers a cat, who proceeds to hop in a car and drive around the goat in circles. Disinclined toward this kind of “silly stuff,” a fox then huffs away to sit on a square. Meanwhile, a bear sails a boat and antagonizes the fox. A crash sends the cat onto the box with the goat. After a brief spat, the fox (with the bear chasing angrily after it) soon follows. The ruckus ends in a cliffhanger: “Now they are up here … // How do they get down?” The smart, well-paced structure introduces objects and characters one by one. Each introduced noun appears in a larger-point font, a consistent way to mark these main ingredients as the story progresses in sentence-level complexity. Unlike the objects, the characters are also introduced with compound adjectives, such as “wild-looking one-eyed bear” or “pant-wearing fluffy-eared fox.” Krebs’ colorful, black-outlined cartoon illustrations pop against the white background and skillfully amplify the comedy in the text. With a total vocabulary of fewer than 120 words, the story functions as both read-aloud and intermediate early reader.
A rip-roaring, chuckle-inducing romp. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-3128-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Engaging, rewarding, and utterly delightful.
Readers count from one to 10 and then jump from there to 15, 20, and 25 in this picture book featuring creatures in the wild.
Animals and their babies take the stage in this paper-engineered tale that allows young readers to make surprise discoveries. On the first spread, they meet a bat. Lift up the precisely die-cut bat’s wing to see “1 baby / Holding on tight as they fly through the night.” Page turns are propelled by the query that concludes each and every spread: “Who has more babies than that?” Continuing to count upward, readers meet leopard cubs, owlets, fox kits, leverets, caterpillars, and many more animals. Creatively designed flaps and die cuts, as well as pages with nontraditional trims, invite young hands to lift, peek, and search: Lift leaf-shaped flaps to see “8 baby mice”; peek through tree-trunk–shaped die cuts to see a forest with “15 poults”; and turn pages shaped like verdant hills to see “2 lambs.” The rhymes are unfussy, pleasingly rhythmic, and have unfailingly flawless meter (“9 ducklings / Swimming and snacking, / Practicing quacking”). Richly colored illustrations in vivid crimson, sapphire, marble green, and copper hues feature realistic animals in their natural habitats, though most are given sleek, wide, stylized eyes. The final spread throws readers a curveball with “LOTS of spiderlings,” depicted as die-cut holes with eight legs each on the previous page—and, it turns out, many of the pages before that.
Engaging, rewarding, and utterly delightful. (Picture book/novelty. 3-6)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-32453-0
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Get ready for wordplay that’s giggly and fun and lasts long after the story is…over, alas.
Cheerful endpaper illustrations of rhyming word pairs set the stage for this hilarious jab at the nursery-rhyme format.
One day, Chester wakes up and discovers he has lost his special talent—he can no longer rhyme! The text quips that “it baffled poor Chester. He felt almost queasy. / To match up two sounds, it was always so . . . / . . . simple for him.” A disheartened Chester walks to school through a neighborhood populated by classic European nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale characters—there’s a troll under a bridge, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and more. At school, Chester’s classmates try to help him get his rhyming groove back by staging a show and tell with a cat, bat, mat, hat, and even a rat. Poor Chester can only come up with amusing placeholder names—a bat is a “swingy sports stick,” a mat is a “muddy foot wipe,” and so on. On his way home, he observes community members performing various jobs and has a revelation that puts things in perspective. Monsen’s clever text offers both lexical fun and an important lesson: “This too shall pass.” Well-timed page turns will have kids shouting out the missing, but easily guessable, end rhymes. Sharp-eyed observers will also notice that the shops in the artwork have rhyming names. Hanlon’s busy gouache and colored pencil illustrations are full of attention-grabbing slapstick humor. Chester reads as White; secondary characters have a range of skin tones. (The review was updated for accuracy.)
Get ready for wordplay that’s giggly and fun and lasts long after the story is…over, alas. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5482-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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