Young preschoolers won’t mind this fun story’s occasional imperfections.
A rhyming picture book whimsically portrays stuffed animals separated from and reunited with a key body part.
The narrator David’s stuffed-animal collection has, courtesy of his younger sister, just had its members’ ears plucked off. The animals, distraught and unable to help themselves on account of their stuffed heads, cry out. Our good-natured hero tries to remedying the situation by attempting a number of possible critter/ear combinations, all of which are rejected by the animal ensemble. The day is saved when David, in the role of stuffed-animal surgeon, reaches for the duct tape. After an extensive paean to the wondrousness of duct tape, he gives each animal ears that turn out to be satisfactory, even when they aren’t the auditory organs the animals are meant to have. The satisfied toys collapse into sleep, and the story ends with a light-handed moral message on the virtue of helping friends in need. The reader then has the opportunity to correctly match each animal to its appropriate appendage. Told mainly with an ABAB rhyme scheme, the story flows nicely–meaning that the few aberrations from the rhyme and the occasional sacrifice of syntax are jarring. Not that Jordan sacrifices flow for the sake of anatomical correctness–she counts the spikes of an antler as ears. The story is complemented by crayon like drawings against a white background, accentuating the book’s fanciful tenor and child-friendly approach to narration. The lack of resolution with regard to David’s pesky sibling may leave some justice-oriented readers feeling unsatisfied.
Young preschoolers won’t mind this fun story’s occasional imperfections.Pub Date: July 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-933830-01-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Bishop’s spectacular photographs of the tiny red-eyed tree frog defeat an incidental text from Cowley (Singing Down the Rain, 1997, etc.). The frog, only two inches long, is enormous in this title; it appears along with other nocturnal residents of the rain forests of Central America, including the iguana, ant, katydid, caterpillar, and moth. In a final section, Cowley explains how small the frog is and aspects of its life cycle. The main text, however, is an afterthought to dramatic events in the photos, e.g., “But the red-eyed tree frog has been asleep all day. It wakes up hungry. What will it eat? Here is an iguana. Frogs do not eat iguanas.” Accompanying an astonishing photograph of the tree frog leaping away from a boa snake are three lines (“The snake flicks its tongue. It tastes frog in the air. Look out, frog!”) that neither advance nor complement the action. The layout employs pale and deep green pages and typeface, and large jewel-like photographs in which green and red dominate. The combination of such visually sophisticated pages and simplistic captions make this a top-heavy, unsatisfying title. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-87175-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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