Veteran Delessert’s latest fable features a mole who loses a treasure thanks to a trickster able to play on his fears. Having painstakingly gathered a trove of pretty rocks, Tobias is eager to show it off to a visiting mole. When that visitor warns him that robbers are coming, Tobias frantically and repeatedly disperses the pebbles into hiding places, then brings them back together so that he can keep watch. Eventually he falls into exhausted sleep, and when he wakes he finds, along with a mocking note, all but one stone gone. In keeping with his concept’s complexity, Delessert takes an expressionistic angle on the illustrations, depicting a misshapen Tobias with a smiling, birdlike face, giving him marble-like stones with lustrous patterns and adding ominous imagined figures and swirls of color as evocations of panic and worry. Considering Tobias’s emotional investment in his possessions, his instant recovery from the theft isn’t as credible as his earlier indecisiveness, but the (apparent) point about not trusting strangers is always worth discussing, and Delessert’s art is always worth a look. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 26, 2007
ISBN: 0-618-73474-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2007
At her best, Rylant’s (The Ticky-Tacky Doll, below, etc.) sweetness and sentiment fills the heart; in this outing, however, sentimentality reigns and the end result is pretty gooey. Pandora keeps a lighthouse: her destiny is to protect ships at sea. She’s lonely, but loves her work. She rescues Seabold and heals his broken leg, and he stays on to mend his shipwrecked boat. This wouldn’t be so bad but Pandora’s a cat and Seabold a dog, although they are anthropomorphized to the max. Then the duo rescue three siblings—mice!—and make a family together, although Rylant is careful to note that Pandora and Seabold each have their own room. Choosing what you love, caring for others, making a family out of love, it is all very well, but this capsizes into silliness. Formatted to look like the start of a new series. Oh, dear. (Fiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-84880-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A lesson that never grows old, enacted with verve by two favorite friends
Gerald the elephant learns a truth familiar to every preschooler—heck, every human: “Waiting is not easy!”
When Piggie cartwheels up to Gerald announcing that she has a surprise for him, Gerald is less than pleased to learn that the “surprise is a surprise.” Gerald pumps Piggie for information (it’s big, it’s pretty, and they can share it), but Piggie holds fast on this basic principle: Gerald will have to wait. Gerald lets out an almighty “GROAN!” Variations on this basic exchange occur throughout the day; Gerald pleads, Piggie insists they must wait; Gerald groans. As the day turns to twilight (signaled by the backgrounds that darken from mauve to gray to charcoal), Gerald gets grumpy. “WE HAVE WASTED THE WHOLE DAY!…And for WHAT!?” Piggie then gestures up to the Milky Way, which an awed Gerald acknowledges “was worth the wait.” Willems relies even more than usual on the slightest of changes in posture, layout and typography, as two waiting figures can’t help but be pretty static. At one point, Piggie assumes the lotus position, infuriating Gerald. Most amusingly, Gerald’s elephantine groans assume weighty physicality in spread-filling speech bubbles that knock Piggie to the ground. And the spectacular, photo-collaged images of the Milky Way that dwarf the two friends makes it clear that it was indeed worth the wait.
A lesson that never grows old, enacted with verve by two favorite friends . (Early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4231-9957-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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