Go, Nathan! Stick it to the Man...er, Fairy.
A lad’s determination to keep his baby teeth sets him against not only the tooth fairy, but the whole Fay bureaucracy behind her.
Far more interested in the teeth than the money, Nathan ingeniously hides each fallen chopper—to no avail, as his assigned tooth fairy is just as determined to collect them, and she comes armed with a high-tech Super Tooth Sensomatic to do the job. Clad in formal office togs and topped with a ’do that wouldn’t dare show even a hair out of place in Parker’s comically detailed digital paintings, the tiny tooth fairy positively oozes bureaucratic severity. But Nathan outlasts her and even a squad of thuggish enforcers euphemistically dubbed “Tooth Experts” from the 15th League of Enchanted Commerce to earn both a rare certificate of exemption and a dental rebate. “ ‘Thanks!’ said Nathan. ‘I’ll keep them forever.’ / And he did.” The increasingly stern official missives from the tooth fairy are depicted in typescript on letterhead in the illustrations. While children are unlikely to have encountered communications of this ilk on their own behalfs, they will likely have seen their grown-ups tearing their hair out over similar ones—and their grown-ups will enjoy them thoroughly.
Go, Nathan! Stick it to the Man...er, Fairy. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4169-7915-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Superficially appealing; much less so upon closer examination.
When Rabbit’s unbridled mania for collecting carrots leaves him unable to sleep in his cozy burrow, other animals offer to put him up.
But to Rabbit, their homes are just more storage space for carrots: Tortoise’s overstuffed shell cracks open; the branch breaks beneath Bird’s nest; Squirrel’s tree trunk topples over; and Beaver’s bulging lodge collapses at the first rainstorm. Impelled by guilt and the epiphany that “carrots weren’t for collecting—they were for SHARING!” Rabbit invites his newly homeless friends into his intact, and inexplicably now-roomy, burrow for a crunchy banquet. This could be read (with some effort) as a lightly humorous fable with a happy ending, and Hudson’s depictions of carrot-strewn natural scenes, of Rabbit as a plush bunny, and of the other animals as, at worst, mildly out of sorts support that take. Still, the insistent way Rabbit keeps forcing himself on his friends and the magnitude of the successive disasters may leave even less-reflective readers disturbed. Moreover, as Rabbit is never seen actually eating a carrot, his stockpiling looks a lot like the sort of compulsive hoarding that, in humans, is regarded as a mental illness.
Superficially appealing; much less so upon closer examination. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62370-638-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
If James Marshall’s George and Martha were not hippos and were both girls, they would be much like best friends Bink and Gollie in this charming early-reader series debut. Tall, quirkily formal Gollie says “Greetings”; the shorter, more casual Bink just says hello. Gollie uses words like “compromise” and “implore”; Bink needs to learn them fast to keep up. Three winsome short stories—“Don’t You Need a New Pair of Socks?,” “P.S. I’ll Be Back Soon” and “Give a Fish a Home”—illustrate the eminently surmountable challenges to Bink and Gollie’s friendship in rapid-fire dialogue that manages to be both witty and earnest. Fucile’s terrific, cartoonish artwork is expressive and hilarious—black-and-white scratchy lines and washes that effectively use spot color to highlight, say, alarmingly hideous rainbow socks or the faint underwater orange of a freshly liberated pet goldfish. One favorite wordless spread shows Bink holding up her goldfish bowl at the movie theater so her fish-friend can see Mysteries of the Deep Blue Sea… seated next to a mortified Gollie. More, please! (Early reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7636-3266-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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