Some solid advice about both the cafeteria and life is embedded in this tongue-in-cheek tale.
Grandits and Austin team up again to bring readers more school rules that they should (not!) follow.
Kyle, who survived breaking all Ten Rules You Absolutely Must Not Break if You Want to Survive the School Bus (2011), is older now—the bespectacled white lad’s got new interests, mainly all things insect—but he still worries about following the rules. So when a girl on his bus learns he is buying lunch for the first time (horrors!), he follows her advice and takes notes. Will he manage to survive breaking all seven rules, as is inevitable? While some of these rules will be helpful to the elementary or middle school set navigating the lunchroom, others humorously debunk their what-ifs by showing Kyle surviving the worst. They range from not holding up the line or taking too much to remembering to pay, sitting with your classmates (certainly not with the big kids!), and holding onto your tray. Austin’s acrylic, colored pencil, and digital illustrations both wonderfully portray Kyle’s every emotion and hysterically show his imagined metaphors: his class is a column of hungry ants, the lunch lady is an easily annoyed fly on the lookout for trouble, and the sixth-grade bully and his friends are carnivorous water bugs. Refreshingly, the book skips the cliché that school lunches are necessarily bad; the food looks appetizing, and Kyle states it’s very good.
Some solid advice about both the cafeteria and life is embedded in this tongue-in-cheek tale. (Picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-69951-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the...
An all-zombie-all-the-time zombiefest, featuring a bunch of grade-school kids, including protagonist Stink and his happy comrades.
This story covers the few days preceding the much-anticipated Midnight Zombie Walk, when Stink and company will take to the streets in the time-honored stiff-armed, stiff-legged fashion. McDonald signals her intent on page one: “Stink and Webster were playing Attack of the Knitting Needle Zombies when Fred Zombie’s eye fell off and rolled across the floor.” The farce is as broad as the Atlantic, with enough spookiness just below the surface to provide the all-important shivers. Accompanied by Reynolds’ drawings—dozens of scene-setting gems with good, creepy living dead—McDonald shapes chapters around zombie motifs: making zombie costumes, eating zombie fare at school, reading zombie books each other to reach the one-million-minutes-of-reading challenge. When the zombie walk happens, it delivers solid zombie awfulness. McDonald’s feel-good tone is deeply encouraging for readers to get up and do this for themselves because it looks like so much darned fun, while the sub-message—that reading grows “strong hearts and minds,” as well as teeth and bones—is enough of a vital interest to the story line to be taken at face value.Pub Date: March 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5692-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Best for readers who have clearly indicated they would like to take their writing efforts to the next level.
A young white girl writes and illustrates a story, which is critiqued by the narrator as it is created.
The girl begins her story by drawing a Hero. Then she thinks maybe a Heroine would be better. Then she decides both will work. She places them in “a good town, filled with good people, called our Setting.” The narrator, an unseen editor who lurks over the artist’s shoulder, tells the storyteller she needs to put in some Conflict, make the Evil Overlord scarier, and give it better action. This tongue-in-cheek way of delivering the rules of creative writing is clever, and paired with Le Huche’s earnest, childlike illustrations, it seems to be aimed at giving helpful direction to aspiring young creators (although the illustrations are not critiqued). But the question needs to be asked: do very young writers really need to know the rules of writing as determined by adults? While the story appears to be about helping young readers learn writing—there is “A Friendly List of Words Used in this Book” at the end with such words as “protagonist” and “antagonist” (glossed as “Hero and Heroine” and “Evil Overlord,” respectively)—it also has a decidedly unhelpful whiff of judgment. Rules, the text seems to say, must be followed for the story to be a Good one. Ouch.
Best for readers who have clearly indicated they would like to take their writing efforts to the next level. (Picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-2935-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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