Fun and topical.
Curious bears trigger a media frenzy.
It all starts when Jean Louis, the host of the kids’ show Our Furry Planet, pokes a sleeping bear. The bear rears up, startled. Jean Louis flees, and the bear’s not far behind. He and a pal perch atop the Our Furry Planet truck gleefully, with arms in the air as if riding a roller coaster. Across the bottom of every double-page spread, updates appear in a blue ribbon, just like on the TV news channels. Except here, the updates are dire while the bears are clearly no threat. As people run screaming through the streets, the bears calmly take in the sights. When two terrified kids abandon their toy vehicles, the bears happily jump on. (Mom’s so excited to be on television she doesn’t notice a thing.) In hats and human clothes, the bears go unnoticed at a department store. (Hysterically, the male bear’s outfit resembles Paddington’s, while the female’s dress looks an awful lot like the Berenstains’ Mother Bear’s.) Outside, the bears make a beeline for an ice cream truck, inadvertently interfering with robbers making a getaway. In an instant, the bears go from fugitives to media darlings. Biedrzycki delivers a genuine message with a light touch. His Adobe Photoshop illustrations are bold and playful, appropriately reminiscent of vintage Hanna-Barbera and a good match for the slapstick story.
Fun and topical. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58089-663-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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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