Since she’s on a diet and only going to chow 11 of the dozen cream puffs in the box, Minnie—Cazet’s blond-shocked bovine—is going to give one to the farmer because it’s his birthday. To surprise him, she is going to hide it under his pillow. Moo—also bovine, but a tad less crazily impetuous than Minnie—is inspired to knit the farmer a sweater after a collision between a flock of sheep and a detachment of chickens carrying Elvis, the imperious rooster, in a sedan chair. The heap of sheep is stuck atop Elvis, and only knitting their wool away will uncover the fowl muckamuck. Working fast, Moo inadvertently, and unknowingly, knits Elvis into the sweater. The lumpy sweater squawks, sneezes, crawls about and even takes brief flight. Clearly, a haunted sweater. Cazet is up to his old but evergreen tricks in this latest Minnie and Moo debacle, fashioning a story of high entertainment value—dwelling in a world of supreme lunacy, yet with an agreeable dryness running through it—to keep a bunch of young noses stuck in the pleasure of a book, inhaling the words. What becomes of Elvis? Well, a rolling pin is involved. There is, after all, a weird bulge in the sweater. (Easy reader. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-073016-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
Tasty fare for alien fans.
When his summer snack stand fails to attract family and neighbors, an enterprising young chef with a flair for the unusual draws some very weird customers from way out of town.
This creative young boy likes to help his mom cook and make up his own recipes. His sister finds his eggplant, mustard, and lemonade smoothie disgusting and warns him that no one in the world or the universe would eat what he cooks. Undaunted, he builds a snack stand, but no one comes for his waffles, smoothies and sandwiches. Just as the boy gives up, a flying saucer lands near the shack one night, and his first alien customer samples the mushroom iced tea. Word spreads through the galaxy, and creatures line up nightly for their favorite dishes: Swiss-cheese doughnut holes, turnip-side-down cake, sponge cake with leeks, and bean puffs. But when the boy mixes all his favorite ingredients into Galactic Pudding, he may have gone too far for even his far-out clientele. Rendered in ink, pencil and digital techniques, quiet illustrations embellish the spare text by casting glowing moonlight on a bevy of eerie, silly, fantastical extraterrestrials in nocturnal purples, blues and greens. Whimsical pairing of creatures and snacks—an enormous critter with a giant mouthful of teeth loves the toothpaste soup, for instance—proves especially rib-tickling.
Tasty fare for alien fans. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2398-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel.
In this Japanese import, the first in a long-running series to appear in English, two girls ride bikes through a forest—with stops for clover-blossom tea and jam sandwiches.
It’s such a benign wood that Chirri and Chirra—depicted as a prim pair of identical twins with straight bob cuts—think nothing of sharing both a lunch spot and a nap beneath a tree with a bear and a rabbit. Moreover, at convenient spots along the way there is a forest cafe with a fox waiter plus “tables and chairs of all different size” to accommodate the diverse forest clientele, a bakery offering “bread in all different shapes and jam in all different colors,” and, just as the sun goes down, a forest hotel with similarly diverse keys and doors. That night a forest concert draws the girls and the hotel’s animal guests to their balconies to join in: “La-la-la, La-la-la. What a wonderful night in the forest!” Despite heavy doses of cute, the episode is saved from utter sappiness by the inclusive spirit of the forest stops and the delightfully unforced way that the girls offer greetings to a pair of honeybees at a tiny adjacent table in the cafe, show no anxiety at the spider dangling above their napping place, and generally accept their harmonious sylvan world as a safe and friendly place. Doi creates her illustrations with colored pencil, pastel, and crayon, crafting them to look like mid-20th-century lithographs.
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59270-199-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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