A celebration of bravery against a big bully—though picky eaters might sympathize with the shark.
Confronting a toothy shark, a young pearl diver displays courage, cleverness, and a compelling counteroffensive.
A brown-skinned child in a red wetsuit, her hair in two puffs, leaps from a boat wearing a mask and a diving tube. Reaching the “very bitty bottom of the deep blue sea,” she spies a pearl for her net—just as a sizable shark surges up. His extremely broad grin is hungry, not friendly. But the plucky girl strikes a deal with him: She’ll provide the shark with an alternative seafood dinner or else be his main course. The tasting menu of options includes “a squid with her kid,” frilly jellyfish, puffer fish, and a stingray. Each proves violently indigestible and is promptly ejected, with assorted sound effects: “OUCH! AAH! ICK! SPIT! BLAH!” As in Bernstrom’s One Day in the Eucalyptus, Eucalyptus Tree, illustrated by Brendan Wenzel (2016), regurgitation reigns. In a desperate bid, the girl convinces the shark to try a turtle, whose shell shatters his teeth. Deal over, he goes to “CHOMP!” her, but she blocks his mouth with her net and bears the pearl triumphantly away, safely rejoining her parent in the boat. This neon cartoon version of a reef, all soft edges, looks like a rainbow garden, until we see its dangerous inhabitants, pastel but perilous. Goofy details such as the shark’s ridiculous pink tongue support the upbeat emphasis on the rollicking rhythm and rhymes and the vibrant undersea setting.
A celebration of bravery against a big bully—though picky eaters might sympathize with the shark. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9781662640827
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Hippo Park/Astra Books for Young Readers
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories.
Kids know vegetables can be scary, but rarely are edible roots out to get someone. In this whimsical mock-horror tale, carrots nearly frighten the whiskers off Jasper Rabbit, an interloper at Crackenhopper Field.
Jasper loves carrots, especially those “free for the taking.” He pulls some in the morning, yanks out a few in the afternoon, and comes again at night to rip out more. Reynolds builds delicious suspense with succinct language that allows understatements to be fully exploited in Brown’s hilarious illustrations. The cartoon pictures, executed in pencil and then digitally colored, are in various shades of gray and serve as a perfectly gloomy backdrop for the vegetables’ eerie orange on each page. “Jasper couldn’t get enough carrots … / … until they started following him.” The plot intensifies as Jasper not only begins to hear the veggies nearby, but also begins to see them everywhere. Initially, young readers will wonder if this is all a product of Jasper’s imagination. Was it a few snarling carrots or just some bathing items peeking out from behind the shower curtain? The ending truly satisfies both readers and the book’s characters alike. And a lesson on greed goes down like honey instead of a forkful of spinach.
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-0297-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
Chilling in the best ways.
When a young rabbit who’s struggling in school finds a helpful crayon, everything is suddenly perfect—until it isn’t.
Jasper is flunking everything except art and is desperate for help when he finds the crayon. “Purple. Pointy…perfect”—and alive. When Jasper watches TV instead of studying, he misspells every word on his spelling test, but the crayon seems to know the answers, and when he uses the crayon to write, he can spell them all. When he faces a math quiz after skipping his homework, the crayon aces it for him. Jasper is only a little creeped out until the crayon changes his art—the one area where Jasper excels—into something better. As guilt-ridden Jasper receives accolade after accolade for grades and work that aren’t his, the crayon becomes more and more possessive of Jasper’s attention and affection, and it is only when Jasper cannot take it anymore that he discovers just what he’s gotten himself into. Reynolds’ text might as well be a Rod Serling monologue for its perfectly paced foreboding and unsettling tension, both gentled by lightly ominous humor. Brown goes all in to match with a grayscale palette for everything but the purple crayon—a callback to black-and-white sci-fi thrillers as much as a visual cue for nascent horror readers. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Chilling in the best ways. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6588-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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