Appealing art and, occasionally, wordplay but overall an incoherent jumble.
Surprises galore lurk beneath small flaps and reverse folds in shops and shopping bags, at a salon, a museum, and the circus.
Readers following a blond, white lad’s stroll through town are in for a surreal experience. Each stop features heavy-handed jokes or inscrutable revelations cued by leading questions: “And what is that under the baker’s hat?” A brioche, it turns out, along with a rolling pin and a hard-to-parse comment that “He’s always prepared!” (For what?) Some transformations involve wordplay. Lift a salon poster labeled “Fetching!” and there’s a dog, labeled “Fetch!” The dark-skinned cave woman with an Afro who holds the “First rock tool” in a glass case is likewise transformed into the “First rock star.” (Really?) But how does the dinosaur tie beneath a museum guard’s coat make him a “kindred spirit” to the thief who has snatched a Ming vase revealed behind the sarcophagus across the gutter? Who are the “Eliott” and “Elisa” who feature in a tattoo on an elephant (“An elephant never forgets eternal love!”) and then “wish you well” at the end? The tidy, very simply drawn shops and other settings, peopled with a mix of pink- and brown-skinned figures, are easy on the eye—but good luck to anyone trying to draw sense out of the scenarios.
Appealing art and, occasionally, wordplay but overall an incoherent jumble. (Pop-up picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6157-0
Page Count: 22
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be...
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip.
The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface.
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel.
In this Japanese import, the first in a long-running series to appear in English, two girls ride bikes through a forest—with stops for clover-blossom tea and jam sandwiches.
It’s such a benign wood that Chirri and Chirra—depicted as a prim pair of identical twins with straight bob cuts—think nothing of sharing both a lunch spot and a nap beneath a tree with a bear and a rabbit. Moreover, at convenient spots along the way there is a forest cafe with a fox waiter plus “tables and chairs of all different size” to accommodate the diverse forest clientele, a bakery offering “bread in all different shapes and jam in all different colors,” and, just as the sun goes down, a forest hotel with similarly diverse keys and doors. That night a forest concert draws the girls and the hotel’s animal guests to their balconies to join in: “La-la-la, La-la-la. What a wonderful night in the forest!” Despite heavy doses of cute, the episode is saved from utter sappiness by the inclusive spirit of the forest stops and the delightfully unforced way that the girls offer greetings to a pair of honeybees at a tiny adjacent table in the cafe, show no anxiety at the spider dangling above their napping place, and generally accept their harmonious sylvan world as a safe and friendly place. Doi creates her illustrations with colored pencil, pastel, and crayon, crafting them to look like mid-20th-century lithographs.
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59270-199-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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