Skip this tale of wish fulfilment gone wrong.
A pint-sized king’s boredom and his easy access to a wizard result in a series of messes.
Dark-skinned Jasper’s got quite the life: ruling from a throne of pillows, eating ice cream every afternoon, reading and coloring. But one day he wants something more. His solution is to ask the white wizard for a dragon—excitement personified. The wizard’s not too sure, but since Jasper is the king, “poof!” Excitement comes with a trail of fires it leaves in its wake. The robots the wizard calls forth to stamp out the fires only wreak more havoc, and the superheroes summoned to rein in the robots raise jealousy among the kingdom’s kids when they see Jasper being flown about. An army of kittens is surely the answer. They do stop the kids’ wailing but cause other problems, especially with Janey, a white girl with allergies. She does help Jasper realize, though, that perhaps the something more he was searching for was a friend, though Snyder never makes this message overt; kids may miss it, especially since they will be wondering why a king with a wizard is cleaning up the mess by hand. Damant’s illustrations portray a diverse cast with wide eyes that lack eyelids, giving the people a manic look, and the kittens will have adults imagining candy-colored Felix the Cats.
Skip this tale of wish fulfilment gone wrong. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62336-874-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Rodale Kids
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Wild and wacky.
A picture book from the comedy duo known as Rhett & Link, creators of the online juggernaut Good Mythical Morning.
Lumo is obsessed with chicken fingers; Saffy, who is new to town and anxious about starting school, finds comfort in the only food she likes: buttered spaghetti. The night before the first day of school, a thunderstorm rages, and each kid makes a wish—“to have chicken fingers at school,” in Lumo’s case; Saffy wishes for “the first thing off the top of her head: buttered spaghetti.” File under “Be careful what you wish for.” Lumo’s and Saffy’s respective physical changes (chicken fingers for fingers, spaghetti for hair) make navigating school a challenge but bring them together in the cafeteria, where they enjoy some new foods—and their new friendship. The plotting could have been sharper: Why do the kids’ bodies suddenly return to normal? And couldn’t the authors have thought up a less old-hat story-ending punch line? Nevertheless, McLaughlin and Neal get by on their charm, and the plot sets up some funny visuals. Salcedo’s cartoony Photoshop art features well-chosen artifacts from a typical kid’s life and captures the mortification of not fitting in, which will be familiar even to readers who have never experienced breaded fingers or noodle hair. Lumo is brown-skinned and dark-haired; Saffy is pale-skinned with disheveled reddish-brown hair.
Wild and wacky. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9780063474154
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperPop/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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