Bursting with life in its clever visuals and antic sense of play, an abundance of activity is on offer in this story about a fun-loving red lizard.
Rita, the titular flat, red lizard, is first seen lounging on the beach as a paper sailboat passes by. "Rita thinks she is a chameleon just like her Uncle William," but her bright, unchanging color and strange habits (like snoring while she sleeps on a zebra) don't exactly make her blend into the background. The identity crisis is solved with the help of her animal friends, and the whole affair concludes with a festive dance party as Rita celebrates who she really is. The message is carefully inserted into dense layers of gorgeously textured art and buoyed by plenty of surrealist touches. A giraffe wears boots; a duck flies by, calmly embedded within a hot-air balloon; and a photo on a wall suddenly sprouts a long, stringy mustache. The app's animations and extra features are beautifully presented and fit right in with the rest of the story. If that weren't enough, each page has an optional countdown that tells readers exactly how many interactive goodies are available. Activate all of them and an award notification pops up that, remarkably, doesn't break up the flow of the story. Rita's realization that being a lizard is great is carried effortlessly by all the terrific visual asides along the way. (iPad storybook app. 3-10)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Irene Blasco Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
Perfect for those looking for a scary Halloween tale that won’t leave them with more fears than they started with. Pair with...
Reynolds and Brown have crafted a Halloween tale that balances a really spooky premise with the hilarity that accompanies any mention of underwear.
Jasper Rabbit needs new underwear. Plain White satisfies him until he spies them: “Creepy underwear! So creepy! So comfy! They were glorious.” The underwear of his dreams is a pair of radioactive-green briefs with a Frankenstein face on the front, the green color standing out all the more due to Brown’s choice to do the entire book in grayscale save for the underwear’s glowing green…and glow they do, as Jasper soon discovers. Despite his “I’m a big rabbit” assertion, that glow creeps him out, so he stuffs them in the hamper and dons Plain White. In the morning, though, he’s wearing green! He goes to increasing lengths to get rid of the glowing menace, but they don’t stay gone. It’s only when Jasper finally admits to himself that maybe he’s not such a big rabbit after all that he thinks of a clever solution to his fear of the dark. Brown’s illustrations keep the backgrounds and details simple so readers focus on Jasper’s every emotion, writ large on his expressive face. And careful observers will note that the underwear’s expression also changes, adding a bit more creep to the tale.
Perfect for those looking for a scary Halloween tale that won’t leave them with more fears than they started with. Pair with Dr. Seuss’ tale of animate, empty pants. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4424-0298-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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