The forced rhymes will be too painful for some readers, but very patient children will find it hilarious and surreal and a...
Any author can find a rhyme for “cow” or “moo.”
By the time they start school, most kids have read dozens of books about farm animals, but they may not have seen an ibex or a hyrax or a hoopoe. This board book would make an excellent compendium for children who want to be zoologists, but it creates a huge challenge for the author: Almost nothing rhymes with “ibex.” She goes out of her way to work around the problem: “Ibexes on crater ledges / Call out ‘Maa!’ and walk the edges.” Every couplet is awkward, but every new animal is surprising, and Kuman finds unexpected ways of painting them. Her bats are shaped like Chinese dumplings, and her camels are an unexpected assortment of geometric objects: a mountain peak perched atop a tiny rectangle underneath a slightly lopsided eggplant. The book also provides a variety of sound effects. The last two pages are crammed with “chirrup”s and “urr”s and “oop”s. It feels as though an entire encyclopedia of animals—a very odd one—has been squeezed into 12 pages. The book also gives kids an incentive to travel. The cover copy says, “Meet some of Israel’s unique animals.”
The forced rhymes will be too painful for some readers, but very patient children will find it hilarious and surreal and a little startling, and they’ll learn years’ worth of animal facts before they reach kindergarten. (Board book. 1-4)Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5415-0049-5
Page Count: 12
Publisher: Kar-Ben
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
The book is a terrific, if slight, way to introduce toddlers to Israel. The only danger is that they’ll spend the rest of...
Some people believe that the sound effects are the best part of a comic book. This story is for them.
If someone removed all the words from a graphic novel except for the sound effects, it would sound a lot like this board book. Sample text: “Rumble, bumble, zoom, zoom, zoom. / Kibbutz tractors vroom, vroom, vroom.” The book is a sort of Gerald McBoing-Boing guide to Israel, highlighting a different cultural activity on every page. Key words appear in brightly colored letters: In addition to kibbutz, for instance, there are “palm trees,” “falafel,” “pita,” “windmill,” and “matkot” (an Israeli game that’s similar to beach tennis but without a net). Mack’s digital illustrations are so stylized that, charmingly, the children in the pictures are shaped just like their matkot paddles. The pictures feature every shade of skin tone, which will make Israel even more appealing to many readers. The constant sound effects don’t leave much room for an in-depth look at Israeli culture, but the variety of activities covered in a 12-page book is impressive, and “pock, pock, pock!” is a surprisingly effective summary of matkot.
The book is a terrific, if slight, way to introduce toddlers to Israel. The only danger is that they’ll spend the rest of the day saying “glub, glub, glub” and “pock, pock, pock!” (Board book. 1-4)Pub Date: March 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5415-0969-6
Page Count: 12
Publisher: Kar-Ben
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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