This America at Work entry features cartoon illustrations of a smiling family on a trip “out east” to a Junior Miners’ hockey tournament. The mother works in a molybdenum mine, the father works in a steel mill, and parental offers to take their twins to work meet with great approval. Even readers unfamiliar with the series may surmise, rightly, that this is going to be a wordy ride through material that may or may not be useful in writing school reports. Cutaway charts intended to support the hackneyed premise do little to clarify the goings on in an underground mine; two miners in hard hats who are “making the roof safe,” for example, shore up a shaft with what appear to be automatic weapons with tiny flying buttresses set on the shaft’s floor. The topic-driven trip includes visits to a steel mill, an airplane ride, an oil well, a toxic dump, a picnic in a park that was once a coal pit, and ends in a hockey arena, with the kids asking all the right questions to keep the facts flowing. They count things made from steel or oil in an “interactivity” befitting the automaton-like nature of progeny who actually let their mother get away with lecturing, “At a smelter, the bits of molybdenum ore are heated and refined to form a powder of pure molybdenum.” (index) (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55074-508-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
4-8)
A blustering, self-infatuated lion takes his lumps and gains a crack at redemption in Yaccarino's (An Octopus Followed
Me Home, 1997, etc.) latest offering. The Lord of the Jungle is busy lording over it all: the monkeys fan him, the elephants provide shade, the leopards fetch his food, and the gorillas tend to his mane—or else he will eat them. Of course, as Yaccarino dryly summarizes, "The animals couldn't stand him one bit." One day a man is spied strolling through the jungle. The lion attacks, but is disarmed when the fellow says he can make him a big star. The lion obviously doesn't recognize the plaid jacket and shades as the mark of a shyster, because in no time at all, the lion is being exploited and demeaned as a circus act. Until, that is, he eats the man and makes his getaway. Back to the jungle he hurries, fully intending to take up his place of honor, but instead finds the other animals being locked into cages for shipment. The animals are not keen on the lion's reappearance (their words sting the lion), but they are unwitting about the future and what the cages represent. It falls upon our hero to work the oldest circus trick in the book, liberate the animals, and then rein in his arrogance. (They don't call it a "pride" of lions for nothing.) The droll story comes with a toothsome accompaniment of Yaccarino's retro art, with its edge of goofiness and deep-dish color. (Picture book.
4-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82235-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wonderful tumble into a landscape in which dreams and real life overlap, turning the village fool into a masterful performer, and a mere nap into a circus gala. When Pierre dozes off during a midday nap, he doesn’t expect to wake up in the middle of a traveling circus. He rationalizes all the weird animals and costumed performers by believing he is in a dream; therefore, it’s safe to take all kinds of death-defying risks. Pierre tames a lion, walks the tightrope with a pretty acrobat, rides horseback, and swings from the trapeze, all with perfect confidence, and all to the amazement of the other villagers, who know him only as a lazy fool. When evening comes, Pierre is so tired he falls asleep again, and when he wakes up, the circus is gone. Armstong (Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, 1999, etc.) is an adept storyteller and Gaber’s pastoral illustrations have a mistiness that enhances the dreamy quality of this tale. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8037-1700-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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