A marauding band of neighborhood cats of every color invades the house of a red-haired little girl and her tow-headed brother in this amusing easy reader from the talented Holub (The Garden That We Grew, below, etc.). The frolicking felines wreak havoc throughout the house before the children shoo them out, but then the house is a little too quiet and lonely, so the kids invite the cats back to stay under more controlled circumstances. The satisfying conclusion shows the kitties curled up asleep all over the children’s bedroom: “Fat cats purr all day. Our cats here to stay.” Holub uses patterned sentence structures, with rollicking rhythm, rhyming couplets, and repetition of key words providing lots of help for new readers. Delightfully loose watercolors by Davis (Tiny Goes to the Library, not reviewed, etc.) add humorous details and plenty of action, while providing picture clues and exact picture-to-text match. Thoughtful art direction varies the placement of text (appropriate for a reader at the 1.9 level) and encourages left to right flow across the pages. A model for the genre: a funny, satisfying story with solid educational underpinnings. A first choice for most libraries. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-89279-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work.
A young spinach hater becomes a spinach lover after she has to grow her own in a class garden.
Unable to trade away the seed packet she gets from her teacher for tomatoes, cukes or anything else more palatable, Sylvia reluctantly plants and nurtures a pot of the despised veggie then transplants it outside in early spring. By the end of school, only the plot’s lettuce, radishes and spinach are actually ready to eat (talk about a badly designed class project!)—and Sylvia, once she nerves herself to take a nibble, discovers that the stuff is “not bad.” She brings home an armful and enjoys it from then on in every dish: “And that was the summer Sylvia Spivens said yes to spinach.” Raff uses unlined brushwork to give her simple cartoon illustrations a pleasantly freehand, airy look, and though Pryor skips over the (literally, for spinach) gritty details in both the story and an afterword, she does cover gardening basics in a simple and encouraging way.
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836615-1-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Readers to Eaters
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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