The creators of Cook-A-Doodle-Doo! (1999) spin off a freewheeling yarn from a familiar nursery rhyme, salting their tale with awful puns and peppering it with folktale references. When Dish and Spoon run away as they’re supposed to, but fail to come back, Cat, Dog, and Cow set off to track them down. (“Without Dish and Spoon, there’s no rhyme. No more diddle, diddle. It’s over.”) Following a giant, very funny map drawn for them by a Fork in the road, the seekers awaken Little Boy Blue, question a huge, lonely spider sitting on a certain tuffet, and are nearly served up by a Big Bad Wolf (in bunny slippers) before finding the errant table setting at last—at the foot of a certain beanstalk. Stevens fills her sprawling, exuberant pictures with hilarious details, from the lamb suit and red cloak hanging on Wolf’s coat rack to the trio of furry customers in dark glasses getting their tails reattached in Jack’s Repair Shop (“You blew it, I glue it”). Dish has suffered a great fall, but Jack nimbly puts her back together, and all leap back to their places just in time to resume (with a slight modification) their traditional roles. Required reading for all Jacks and Jills. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-202298-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Becalmed in a fog en route to join their forty-niner father in San Francisco, Tessie and Sarah are disappointed not to arrive in time for Christmas. A magical adventure puts things in perspective: Saint Nick, looking like the Noah in their toy ark, turns up in an airship ark and takes them around the world while he delivers gifts, his many stops including their old home in Maine and the hotel room in San Francisco where Papa has Christmas waiting for them. The attractive watercolor illustrations here stir the imagination more than the long, predictable text, but only half the exotic scenes described are shown. An adequate additional seasonal book. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-24836-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
In an ode to women and Mother Earth, a mother addresses her daughter in a poem filled with images of nature as feminine. Coyne’s debut opens with a refrain of the title, answered with stanzas that begin, “You are of woman . . .” and continue with sentient metaphors, “whose hands are the harvest./Whose hearts are/the deep, deep lake/and whose voices are/the silver birch of the woodland.” The poem is an awakening, whispered as a shared secret between mother and daughter. While some of its lofty images and abstract sentiments of womanhood may be lost on the picture-book audience, it does celebrate every girl’s inner strength through her connectedness to ancestral earth, an archetypal woman-mother. The physical and metaphysical are entangled here; words are wildflowers, hair is thick as the prairie, lives are the earth underfoot. Halstead represents woman’s direct relationship to nature with encircling arms, swirling waters, curling hair, heads bent in embrace, and strong-faced trees turned skyward. Amphibious hands and feet transport readers past the human into a realm where forms of women are the landscape—the stomach is a soft hill (and part of a reclining nude), the profile of a face is a mountainous skyline. Prismatic figures dance, bend, and radiate color, reflecting nature’s bounty. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-5301-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
