Something like a gender-switched companion to the author’s My Rules for Being a Pretty Princess (2015), but with more give...
A little boy finds out what dinosaurs do…and vice versa.
The titular proclamation, delivered in oversized type by an overstimulated white boy with wide blue eyes, brings on a young theropod, also blue, who provides some not-entirely-necessary instruction: “And first, you must learn how to… / ROAR! / Next comes STOMPING!” With eating, though, the instruction begins to go two ways, as the kinetic kid introduces his carnivorous cohort to the wonders of cake and ice cream, spaghetti, and even sushi. And then on to reading, soccer, and video gaming. All of this leaves the toothy erstwhile tutor rumbling plaintively “I wanna be a LITTLE BOY!” A fine solution presents itself—“Let’s be BOTH!”—and in a final scene, the boy, with a homemade cardboard dinosaur suit strapped on, roars and stomps alongside a prehistoric pal clad in purple shorts and a boxy cap decorated to resemble a blond boy head. McKenzie scatters craft supplies underfoot in his minimally detailed illustrations as further prods to explore the pleasures of playacting.
Something like a gender-switched companion to the author’s My Rules for Being a Pretty Princess (2015), but with more give and take between the roles. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3299-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If James Marshall’s George and Martha were not hippos and were both girls, they would be much like best friends Bink and Gollie in this charming early-reader series debut. Tall, quirkily formal Gollie says “Greetings”; the shorter, more casual Bink just says hello. Gollie uses words like “compromise” and “implore”; Bink needs to learn them fast to keep up. Three winsome short stories—“Don’t You Need a New Pair of Socks?,” “P.S. I’ll Be Back Soon” and “Give a Fish a Home”—illustrate the eminently surmountable challenges to Bink and Gollie’s friendship in rapid-fire dialogue that manages to be both witty and earnest. Fucile’s terrific, cartoonish artwork is expressive and hilarious—black-and-white scratchy lines and washes that effectively use spot color to highlight, say, alarmingly hideous rainbow socks or the faint underwater orange of a freshly liberated pet goldfish. One favorite wordless spread shows Bink holding up her goldfish bowl at the movie theater so her fish-friend can see Mysteries of the Deep Blue Sea… seated next to a mortified Gollie. More, please! (Early reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7636-3266-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
An undistinguished addition to the infuriatingly overstuffed shelves of anger-management treatises.
Pout-Pout goes off the deep end.
Plainly afflicted with anger issues, Mr. Fish leverages a broken knickknack, difficulty finding glue, and the mild reactions of his neighbors to his plight into a towering, out-of-control tantrum. Mrs. Squid offers a tried-and-true (though, at least for a fish, physically impossible) counterstrategy: “To get started, simply breathe. / Then slowly count from one to ten / To counteract the seethe.” Miss Shimmer, another fish, suggests using his words to talk out his feelings…which he does (though only in the pictures, as Diesen declines to use her words to describe what he actually says). Finally, “with words and self-compassion / I bring anger to a stop,” and once he’s gotten his “grrrrr” out, the glue even turns up so that in no time fish and fracture are both “good as new.” Unlike the “seethe” in Molly Bang’s When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry… (1999) or Polly Dunbar’s Red Red Red (2020), the rage here comes across as manufactured rather than genuine—and the coping techniques are more described in general terms than actually demonstrated. Hanna’s cartoon cast of fancifully colored deep-sea denizens is as googly-eyed as ever. He adds some amusing details, as with the labels on Mr. Fish’s storage bins (“Might Need Someday” and “Not Sure will look later”), but the souvenir from “Machoo Poochy” is an unfortunate choice. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 75% of actual size.)
An undistinguished addition to the infuriatingly overstuffed shelves of anger-management treatises. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-30935-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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