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
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work.
A young spinach hater becomes a spinach lover after she has to grow her own in a class garden.
Unable to trade away the seed packet she gets from her teacher for tomatoes, cukes or anything else more palatable, Sylvia reluctantly plants and nurtures a pot of the despised veggie then transplants it outside in early spring. By the end of school, only the plot’s lettuce, radishes and spinach are actually ready to eat (talk about a badly designed class project!)—and Sylvia, once she nerves herself to take a nibble, discovers that the stuff is “not bad.” She brings home an armful and enjoys it from then on in every dish: “And that was the summer Sylvia Spivens said yes to spinach.” Raff uses unlined brushwork to give her simple cartoon illustrations a pleasantly freehand, airy look, and though Pryor skips over the (literally, for spinach) gritty details in both the story and an afterword, she does cover gardening basics in a simple and encouraging way.
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836615-1-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Readers to Eaters
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
There are many parallel legends – the seal women, for example, with their strange sad longings – but none is more direct than this American Indian story of a girl who is carried away in a horses’ stampede…to ride thenceforth by the side of a beautiful stallion who leads the wild horses. The girl had always loved horses, and seemed to understand them “in a special way”; a year after her disappearance her people find her riding beside the stallion, calf in tow, and take her home despite his strong resistance. But she is unhappy and returns to the stallion; after that, a beautiful mare is seen riding always beside him. Goble tells the story soberly, allowing it to settle, to find its own level. The illustrations are in the familiar striking Goble style, but softened out here and there with masses of flowers and foliage – suitable perhaps for the switch in subject matter from war to love, but we miss the spanking clean design of Custer’s Last Battle and The Fetterman Fight. 6-7
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0689845049
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bradbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
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