Using a combination of handmade and bought papers, Young has created a dazzling collage adaptation of the traditional Chinese legend of the Monkey King. Brilliant shades of pink, purple, red, orange, gold, and green are offset by wispy whites and stark blacks on warm earth-toned backgrounds. The colors often leap and swirl across the pages, tracing the trajectories of Monkey’s energetic somersaults and mirroring his irrepressible personality. Always restless and eager for new adventures, Monkey simply can’t keep out of trouble. Born from an exploding rock, he fights the fierce Red Beard Bandit, steals a golden pillar from the underwater palace of the Dragon King, and gobbles up all the forbidden fruit from Jade King’s immortal peach tree. The centerpiece of the book, and of Monkey’s adventures, takes place on pages that fold out both horizontally and vertically as Monkey leaps to a place that he thinks is the end of the earth, but that turns out to be the upraised hand of Buddha. He scribbles, “Monkey was here,” thinking he has triumphed, but in fact he is trapped. After 500 years of captivity, he is freed to have a few more adventures before the end of the book, which concludes when he learns that there is “strength in admitting to weakness.” The narrator leaves the reader with a question and an answer—“Did Monkey’s humility last? That’s another story for another book.” Young’s prose is spare, and the placement of the words is brilliantly integrated into his page designs. An author’s note provides information on the Chinese epic Journey to the West, from which these episodes have been adapted. There is also a list of characters with their descriptions. This visually and thematically rich creation by one of our finest picture book artists is wonderful both to read aloud and to peruse and ponder at leisure. (Picture book/folktale. All ages)
Pub Date: March 31, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-027919-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
Teachers looking for a new way to start off the school year will eat this one up.
In Murray’s children’s debut, when a gingerbread man made by schoolchildren gets left behind at recess, he decides he has to find his class: “I’ll run and I’ll run, / As fast as I can. / I can catch them! I’m their / Gingerbread Man!”
And so begins his rollicking rhyming adventure as he runs, limps, slides and skips his way through the school, guided on his way by the friendly teachers he meets. Flattened by a volleyball near the gym, he gets his broken toe fixed by the kindly nurse and then slides down the railing into the art teacher’s lunch. Then it’s off to the principal’s office, where he takes a spin in her chair before she arrives. “The children you mentioned just left you to cool. / They’re hanging these posters of you through the school.” The principal takes him back to the classroom, where the children all welcome him back. The book’s comic-book layout suits the elementary-school tour that this is, while Lowery’s cartoon artwork fits the folktale theme. Created with pencil, screen printing and digital color, the simple illustrations give preschoolers a taste of what school will be like. While the Gingerbread Man is wonderfully expressive, though, the rather cookie-cutter teachers could use a little more life.
Teachers looking for a new way to start off the school year will eat this one up. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25052-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Beginning invitingly with "warm smells" of bread, rolls, cakes, tarts and cookies (and a cat perched on a red-brick oven) Walter the baker's story ends lamely when he invents the pretzel in answer to the duke's demand for a roll containing "the rising sun, the noontime sun and the setting sun" (the pretzel, Walter explains, has three holes through which the sun can shine). The splashy tissue-paper collages of coarsely comic peasant figures and a cozy half-timbered town are as pointlessly hybrid as the tale.
Pub Date: March 22, 1972
ISBN: 0689800789
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1972
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