For this collection of 30 poems, not only nursery rhymes but also familiar children's songs (“Yankee Doodle,” “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush,” etc.) have been given new lyrics promoting energy conservation activities and healthy living. The author of Texas Mother Goose (2006) here teams up with the “green-minded” author of The Giant Carrot (1998) to produce a lively combination of parody and sound earth-saving suggestions. “Little Jack Horner / Changed bulbs in the corner” and “Hickety, Pickety, free-range hen” combine with a Mother Hubbard who “went to the market / To buy only local.” Their strong message is leavened by Berger’s whimsical, inventive illustrations, which lighten the tone. On varied backgrounds, including lined paper, surreal bird-people with skinny legs and round heads litter and recycle, plant gardens, tend bees, hang laundry on the line and ride bicycles. Five little pig-people “re-re-recycle!” all the way home. Indeed, recycled materials, found papers and ephemera were used for these collages. Bits of text on the papers bear intriguing messages, use unusual fonts and languages and may be reversed. Some of the materials make connections: Mother Hubbard does, indeed, have a cloth shopping bag, and the gardener in "This is the Seed that Jack Sowed" is wearing denim overalls. These illustrations invite close inspection, while the poems will be welcomed in schools where going green is a value. (Poetry. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4027-6525-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wonderfully ridiculous in premise and execution and abounding in creative touches, this will surely spark student spinoffs.
Having recovered from the world-destroying science project she created in the first Oh No! (2010), Barnett’s overachiever has a new dilemma: Her history test is returned with one point off for an incorrect answer.
Noting that “Belgium” is not the country where the oldest prehistoric cave paintings exist, she devises a solution completely out of proportion to the problem. Using a “Phun Times” Kiddie Pool as a foundation, she builds a time machine to alter history. After a few glitches (landing in a pre-Neanderthal world and then in the French Revolution), she finds her Belgian cavemen. As in the companion story, the digital compositions are framed with black horizontal borders and marked with white vertical lines to establish a cinematic context. The plot unfolds through speech bubbles, the faux-technical diagrams on graph paper covering the endpapers and the extremely funny actions and expressions of Santat’s caricatures. Children will relish the two cavemen’s antics: They stick paintbrushes in their noses, chomp on the palette and spray paint each other. The duo gives the transporter a spin while the frustrated scholar decorates the cave herself. She emerges to find one sporting Napoleon’s hat, a Roman chariot speeding by and other anachronisms—not to mention an “F” on her test, now that history has been rearranged.
Wonderfully ridiculous in premise and execution and abounding in creative touches, this will surely spark student spinoffs. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-142314912-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
At once stately and soothing—a fine choice for bedtime sharing or for calming ruffled spirits in general.
In sonorous cumulative verse, a seasonal round set in a garden rich in color, flowers and children.
Beginning and ending with the soil “all dark and deep,” seeds sprout, rain falls and flowers “waltz with the wind.” A songbird hatches, leaves turn, a mantis vainly prays to the moon “that winter come never or not quite so soon.” Jack Frost dances past, leaving an empty nest and “a handful of seeds for the wild wind to blow. / Enough, just enough, for a garden to grow.” Against backdrops of vibrant greens and blues, Cool poses a group of stylized children with distant eyes widely set in modernist, Picasso-esque faces, dressed in brightly patterned clothing and busily digging, watering, playing and, in season, harvesting. Millard introduces subtle changes in wording to the repeated lines to stave off monotony, and the leaves and patterns in the pictures create a dance of color that rises and falls in energy as the annual cycle turns.
At once stately and soothing—a fine choice for bedtime sharing or for calming ruffled spirits in general. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6016-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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