In this version of a common (though here unacknowledged) folktale type, two hunchbacked brothers get their just deserts. After his kindness to woodland creatures and spirits, Morris returns from an errand into the autumn mountains without a hump. His ill-natured brother Boris eagerly sets out with the same expectations. Noting that “what goes around, comes around,” Hasler rewards Boris’s careless, rude, destructive behavior not with a straight back, but with a second hump—whereupon Boris recognizes the error of his ways, and resolves to make amends in the spring. Alternating color spreads with black and white, Bhend creates complex, wonderfully animistic landscapes, filled with both accurately rendered natural details, and hidden faces and forms woven into the underbrush. Though Boris’s remorse makes the lesson unnecessarily explicit, the pictures add a properly mysterious air to an otherwise well-told rendition. Shelve it next to Charlotte Huck’s Toads and Diamonds (1996), illustrated by Anita Lobel, and Robert San Souci’s Talking Eggs (1989), illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. (Picture book/folktale. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7358-2102-X
Page Count: 40
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
Picture-book debuts for both author and illustrator result in an affectionate glimpse of intergenerational bonds. Juno loves to get letters in the red-and-blue bordered airmail envelopes that come from his grandmother, who lives in Korea, near Seoul. He cannot read Korean, but he opens the letter anyway, and learns what he can from what his grandmother has sent: a photograph of herself and her new cat, and a dried flower from her garden. When his parents read him the letter, he realizes how much he learned from the other things his grandmother mailed to him. He creates some drawings of himself, his parents, house, and dog, and sends them along with a big leaf from his swinging tree. He gets back a package that includes drawing pencils and a small airplane—the grandmother is coming to visit. The messages that can be conveyed without words, language differences between generations, and family ties across great distances are gently and affectingly handled in this first picture book. The illustrations, done in oil-paint glazes, are beautifully lit; the characters, particularly Grandmother, with her bowl of persimmons, her leafy garden, and her grey bun that looks “like a powdered doughnut,” are charming. (Picture book. 3-7)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-670-88252-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
One of a four-book series designed to help the very young prepare for new siblings, this title presents a toddler-and-mother pair (the latter heavily pregnant) as they read about new babies, sort hand-me-downs, buy new toys, visit the obstetrician and the sonographer, speculate and wait. Throughout, the child asks questions and makes exclamations with complete enthusiasm: “How big is the baby? What does it eat? I felt it move! Is it a boy or girl?” Fuller’s jolly pictures present a biracial family that thoroughly enjoys every moment together. It’s a bit oversimplified, but no one can complain about the positive message it conveys, appropriately, to its baby and toddler audience. The other titles in the New Baby series are My New Baby (ISBN: 978-1-84643-276-7), Look at Me! (ISBN: 978-1-84643-278-1) and You and Me (ISBN: 978-1-84643-277-4). (Board book. 18 mos.-3)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-84643-275-0
Page Count: 12
Publisher: Child's Play
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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