A playfully sweet and amusing collection that’s an excellent choice for reading aloud.
This illustrated children’s book includes fables, fairy tales, and other short stories.
In the 22 stories collected here, characters can be young or older, and the plots can be fairly realistic or fanciful. The volume features both animal and human characters in a variety of settings: a garden, under the sea, the present day, and a fairy-tale past. While most are original, some employ familiar elements from children’s literature or fables, such as a naughty, carrot-stealing rabbit or, in “The goat who didn’t have any milk to feed her kid,” a narrative reminiscent of “The Little Red Hen.” In these cases, though, the tales provide fresh takes, as in “The true story of the ant and the cicada.” A lazy insect idles the summer away, but instead of leaving him to starve, the ant king invites him to exchange shelter for entertainment. Several tales feature the classic motif of being rewarded for kindness to animals, as in “Once upon a time, a bear went to the circus,” in which a little girl frees a captive circus bear who later gives salmon to her picnicking family. Kalyvas, writing his second children’s book, has a good ear for dialogue and appealing repetition, even supplying read-aloud suggestions for one story: “Tickle-tickle-tickle, he tickled its nose with her whiskers (author’s note to parents: tickle your child’s nose at the same time).” The tales emphasize altruism, compassion, and a spirit of fun, always concluding: “And they lived happily ever after!” Illustrating her second children’s book, Gottardo supplies digital pictures that capture the tales’ humor. Apart from a Bedouin family, all the human characters appear to be White.
A playfully sweet and amusing collection that’s an excellent choice for reading aloud.Pub Date: June 11, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 117
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A delicious triumph over fear of night creatures.
Pippa conquers a fear of the creatures that emerge from her storybooks at night.
Pippa’s “wonderfully wild imagination” can sometimes run “a little TOO wild.” During the day, she wears her “armor” and is a force to be reckoned with. But in bed at night, Pippa worries about “villains and monsters and beasts.” Sharp-toothed and -taloned shadows, dragons, and pirates emerge from her storybooks like genies from a bottle, just to scare her. Pippa flees to her parents’ room only to be brought back time and again. Finally, Pippa decides that she “needs a plan” to “get rid of them once and for all.” She decides to slip a written invitation into every book, and that night, they all come out. She tries subduing them with a lasso, an eye patch, and a sombrero, but she is defeated. Next, she tries “sashes and sequins and bows,” throwing the fashion pieces on the monsters, who…“begin to pose and primp and preen.” After that success, their fashion show becomes a nightly ritual. Clever Pippa’s transformation from scared victim of her own imagination to leader of the monster pack feels fairly sudden, but it’s satisfying nonetheless. The cartoony illustrations effectively use dynamic strokes, shadow, and light to capture action on the page and the feeling of Pippa's fears taking over her real space. Pippa and her parents are brown-skinned with curls of various textures.
A delicious triumph over fear of night creatures. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9300-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
A surprisingly nuanced lesson set in confidence-building, easy-to-decode text.
A unicorn learns a friendship lesson in this chapter-book series opener.
Unicorn Bo has friends but longs for a “bestie.” Luckily, a new unicorn pops into existence (literally: Unicorns appear on especially starry nights) and joins Bo at the Sparklegrove School for Unicorns, where they study things like unicorn magic. Each unicorn has a special power; Bo’s is granting wishes. Not knowing what his own might be distresses new unicorn Sunny. When the week’s assignment is to earn a patch by using their unicorn powers to help someone, Bo hopes Sunny will wish to know Bo's power (enabling both unicorns to complete the task, and besides, Bo enjoys Sunny’s company and wants to help him). But when the words come out wrong, Sunny thinks Bo was feigning friendship to get to grant a wish and earn a patch, setting up a fairly sophisticated conflict. Bo makes things up to Sunny, and then—with the unicorns friends again and no longer trying to force their powers—arising circumstances enable them to earn their patches. The cheerful illustrations feature a sherbet palette, using patterns for texture; on busy pages with background colors similar to the characters’ color schemes, this combines with the absence of outlines to make discerning some individual characters a challenge. The format, familiar to readers of Elliott’s Owl Diaries series, uses large print and speech bubbles to keep pages to a manageable amount of text.
A surprisingly nuanced lesson set in confidence-building, easy-to-decode text. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-32332-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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