Splashy facts and fun in sand and saguaro country.
A horned toad—“I’m actually a lizard”—struts its stuff for a set of burrowing owl nestlings in the harsh Texas desert.
The round-eyed owlets make an appreciative, chatty audience as the horned toad shows off its pointy horns, flicks up ants to eat with its quick tongue, and digs into the dust or fades into a “blend-y spot” when snakes, hawks, or other predators happen by. Impressive…but super? As it turns out, the horned toad can do something else in response to danger—something that will have audiences of young readers joining the owls in chorusing “DO IT AGAIN! DO IT AGAIN!” That would be shooting blood from its eyes, which Shea depicts with cartoony melodrama in a rousingly gory climactic scene. The horned toad doesn’t do it again, noting that “reloading takes time.” But Esbaum keeps the stream of facts going, both with a closing set of true/false questions about the spiny squirter’s characteristics, behavior, and endangered status in Texas, where it is the state reptile, and some background tidbits about burrowing owls, whose ability to scare attackers away from the mouth of their underground nest by rattling like the local viper counts as a “superpower,” too.
Splashy facts and fun in sand and saguaro country. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780593700020
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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