To be devoured with relish—though maybe not broccoli.
The Weenie-Meister’s sixth collection offers 32 more macabre minitales.
He puts the Gorgon back into “Gorgonzola,” pauses for a rousing night of vampire “Catfishing in America” and redefines “Smart Food” through an encounter with talking broccoli, among other ventures. Throughout, Lubar continues to produce short-shorts expertly spun around figures of speech, tweaked story titles and disquieting twists of fate. Pandering particularly to readers with a taste for icky treats, he trots in a protean alien who sets itself up as a sideshow self-mutilator, a bully tricked into blasting out his own cheeks and a smile-obsessed child who melts his teeth away by overusing whitening strips—among other hapless victims of bad behavior, predatory monsters or plain bad luck. The tales' extreme brevity—the longest tops out at a whopping 10 pages—makes them especially well suited to reading aloud.
To be devoured with relish—though maybe not broccoli. (end notes) (Short short stories. 10-12)Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-3213-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Starscape/Tom Doherty
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Children won’t get the jokes; adult readers won’t laugh at them.
With his “Versizer,” a literary shrink ray, Nash condenses works of Homer, Shakespeare, Proust, and six other classic authors into illustrated light verse.
Cleverness is all that could rescue this ill-conceived notion. Unfortunately, aside from occasional glimmers (“No wussie was Ulysses: / He journeyed ’cross the sea / And risked his life / to find his wife, / The sweet Penelope”), it’s in short supply. Resolutely removing nearly all reference to violence, as well as most of the casts and plots, Nash converts Hamlet to a “great Dane” who digs holes (for all except Ophelia, who gets a swimming pool), and Scheherazade to a mouse. He leaves Frankenstein and his monster in a snowball fight, and Ahab waving goodbye as he rides off atop a smiling Moby-Dick. And, for all their brevity, some of the entries make monotonous reading: “Don Quixote” is a string of limericks, for instance, and the eight stanzas of “Jane Eyre” are all modeled on “Three Blind Mice.” In other missteps, the rhyming turns notably uncertain in “A Thousand and One Nights,” the entire entry for Proust (which Nash admits he hasn’t finished reading) is a banal “I dipped a sweet cake in my tea / And a whole world came back to me,” and because Ulysses is portrayed as a child in the cartoon illustrations, it’s disturbing to see him making eyes and playing footsie with the adult-sized Penelope.
Children won’t get the jokes; adult readers won’t laugh at them. (closing notes) (Satire. 10-12, adult)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6972-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More amusing than your average civics class.
A love of learning does not require homework to flourish in Frank’s (Armstrong and Charlie, 2017) latest.
Sixth-grader Sam wants to build a treehouse with his dad and spend more time with his older half sister, Sadie, but instead he faces a seemingly bottomless pit of superfluous schoolwork. One more homework assignment is the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back, launching Sam up on his desk in protest—and subsequently into a three-day suspension. Sadie, mired in her own endless homework Hades, soon joins forces to stand up against the curricular status quo. With a crew of friends who each bring their own areas of expertise and life experience to the team, Sam, Sadie, and their curmudgeonly, retired-lawyer neighbor, Mr. Kalman, manage to take their fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the process, Sam and his squad learn about civics, computer science, economics: more than any worksheet could ever hope to instill. While the pacing of their court case, from principal’s office to the highest court in the land in the span of mere months, stretches the bounds of credulity even for fiction, the story is entertaining and engaging. The characters’ example of project-based learning is likely to appeal to both educators and burned-out students. Sam and Sadie seem to be white by default, and their friends are a relatively diverse group.
More amusing than your average civics class. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-79920-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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