Silly, rhyming euphemisms to jazz up powder-room humor.
Matejek-Morris shows remarkable wordsmithing skill in his laugh-out-loud lines of text. The narrator is depicted as a child who opens the book with a warning: “There are nice words like puppy and buttercup and snickerdoodle, and there are rude words.” To help readers avoid saying rude words, the child then delivers a torrent of tongue-twisting, rhyming euphemisms for poop, pee, burp, belch, butt, boogers, and farts. For the titular rude word, for instance, readers could substitute “humdrum bum crumbs, / float-or-sinker, / major stinker, / sometimes mushy from your tushy, / smelly belly funky jelly.” It all culminates in a cumulative barrage of words that readers will be hard-pressed to say without dissolving into giggles—unless they are distracted and dismayed by some truly unfortunate visual characterization. The protagonist is depicted as a brown-skinned person with black, curly hair. Color associations in the cover art and some interior pages may cause the eye to link the shade of the character’s skin with the anthropomorphized turds that appear along with the aforementioned euphemisms. If that weren’t bad enough, when the cumulative text arrives, it’s presented as a grinning (and farting, urinating, defecating, belching, nose-picking) tap-dancing spectacle that evokes caricatures of minstrelsy. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8-by-14-inch double-page spreads viewed at 50.1% of actual size.)
Just…don’t. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-358-42333-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS
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The Crayons return to celebrate Easter.
Six crayons (Red, Orange, Yellow, Esteban, who is green and wears a yellow cape, White, and Blue) each take a shape and scribble designs on it. Purple, perplexed and almost angry, keeps asking why no one is creating an egg, but the six friends have a great idea. They take the circle decorated with red shapes, the square adorned with orange squiggles “the color of the sun,” the triangle with yellow designs, also “the color of the sun” (a bit repetitious), a rectangle with green wavy lines, a white star, about which Purple remarks: “DID you even color it?” and a rhombus covered with blue markings and slap the shapes onto a big, light-brown egg. Then the conversation turns to hiding the large object in plain sight. The joke doesn’t really work, the shapes are not clear enough for a concept book, and though colors are delineated, it’s not a very original color book. There’s a bit of clever repartee. When Purple observe that Esteban’s green rectangle isn’t an egg, Esteban responds, “No, but MY GOSH LOOK how magnificent it is!” Still, that won’t save this lackluster book, which barely scratches the surface of Easter, whether secular or religious. The multimedia illustrations, done in the same style as the other series entries, are always fun, but perhaps it’s time to retire these anthropomorphic coloring implements. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Let these crayons go back into their box. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-62105-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S HOLIDAYS & CELEBRATIONS
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BOOK REVIEW
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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