Entertaining and enjoyable for building and critter lovers.
Building a house can be a monstrous job.
A crack construction crew of nocturnal monsters, including werewolves, Invisible Man, Cyclops, and witches, teams up to build new digs for a vampire family. The challenge, foreman Frankenstein exhorts: Finish while it’s still dark; the vampires must move in before sunup. Uh-oh! It looks like they may not make the deadline. But, whew, magic prevails: “The job got done / and…no one died.” After the bloodsucker family settles in to the “SCARIEST place / with the SPOOKIEST view,” the sleepy monsters toddle off home with their trucks, tools, and equipment and head to bed. This jaunty rhyming tale will appeal as much to construction aficionados as to monster mavens. Various vehicles, tools, building materials, and nuts and bolts of the trade are mentioned and illustrated, and otherworldly laborers are depicted toiling away. The lively, clipped verses capture the rapid speed and rhythms at which the monsters work to ensure the job’s speedy completion. Humorously lively, energetic illustrations feature numerous busy, multicolored monsters and mounds of dirt; the palette highlights mostly dark shades (this is a nighttime enterprise, after all), but a full moon lights the proceedings well enough to illuminate the monsters’ comical, frantic expressions; a round yellow sun at the book’s conclusion brings the evening’s proceedings to a happy finish.
Entertaining and enjoyable for building and critter lovers. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-0543-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Not enough tricks to make this a treat.
Another holiday title (How To Catch the Easter Bunny by Adam Wallace, illustrated by Elkerton, 2017) sticks to the popular series’ formula.
Rhyming four-line verses describe seven intrepid trick-or-treaters’ efforts to capture the witch haunting their Halloween. Rhyming roadblocks with toolbox is an acceptable stretch, but too often too many words or syllables in the lines throw off the cadence. Children familiar with earlier titles will recognize the traps set by the costume-clad kids—a pulley and box snare, a “Tunnel of Tricks.” Eventually they accept her invitation to “floss, bump, and boogie,” concluding “the dance party had hit the finale at last, / each dancing monster started to cheer! / There’s no doubt about it, we have to admit: / This witch threw the party of the year!” The kids are diverse, and their costumes are fanciful rather than scary—a unicorn, a dragon, a scarecrow, a red-haired child in a lab coat and bow tie, a wizard, and two space creatures. The monsters, goblins, ghosts, and jack-o'-lanterns, backgrounded by a turquoise and purple night sky, are sufficiently eerie. Still, there isn’t enough originality here to entice any but the most ardent fans of Halloween or the series. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Not enough tricks to make this a treat. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72821-035-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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