Everyone wins in this comfortably conventional tale of a lightless young glowworm who finally gets the hang of lighting up. As friends look on laughing, little Leo grunts and squeezes—his problem not constipation, but the inability to strike a light. After retreating into a cave for a good cry, Leo remembers his mother’s advice to keep practicing, and barrels out into an inspirational lightning storm. Muscarello depicts Leo and associates as chubby, neon-purple apostrophes wearing bits of clothing and bearing broad, Disneyesque facial features. Leo ultimately learns not only how to glow, but how to laugh along with his friends too; so, unlike Eric Carle’s Very Lonely Firefly (1995), this is not about sex but self-esteem. Drachman tends to overwrite (“Like all people and bugs and fish and animals of every kind, Leo did not like to be laughed at”), but his fable makes an engaging companion for Robert Kraus’s developmental tales, or Bernard Waber’s classic about a bug with a related but opposite problem, A Firefly Named Torchy (1970). Packaged with a lively, multi-voiced dramatic reading on CD. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-9703809-0-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity.
Buzz and his buzzy buddy open a spinoff series of nonfiction early readers with an aquarium visit.
Buzz: “Like other fish, sharks breathe through gills.” Fly Guy: “GILLZZ.” Thus do the two pop-eyed cartoon tour guides squire readers past a plethora of cramped but carefully labeled color photos depicting dozens of kinds of sharks in watery settings, along with close-ups of skin, teeth and other anatomical features. In the bite-sized blocks of narrative text, challenging vocabulary words like “carnivores” and “luminescence” come with pronunciation guides and lucid in-context definitions. Despite all the flashes of dentifrice and references to prey and smelling blood in the water, there is no actual gore or chowing down on display. Sharks are “so cool!” proclaims Buzz at last, striding out of the gift shop. “I can’t wait for our next field trip!” (That will be Fly Guy Presents: Space, scheduled for September 2013.)
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity. (Informational easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-50771-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet iteration of the “Big Bad Wolf Mellows Out” theme. Here, an old wolf does some soul searching and then learns to like vegetable stew after a half-frozen lamb appears on his doorstep, falls asleep in his arms, then wakes to give him a kiss. “I can’t eat a lamb who needs me! I might get heartburn!” he concludes. Clad in striped leggings and a sleeveless pullover decorated with bands of evergreens, the wolf comes across as anything but dangerous, and the lamb looks like a human child in a fleecy overcoat. No dreams are likely to be disturbed by this book, but hardened members of the Oshkosh set might prefer the more credible predators and sense of threat in John Rocco’s Wolf! Wolf! (March 2007) or Delphine Perrot’s Big Bad Wolf and Me (2006). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58925-067-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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