A cautionary tale on the hazards of distracted driving? If anything, just the opposite, but it’s sure a lot of fun.
Silly results turn a multivehicle accident into a street party in this onomatopoeic import.
Spread-filling iterations of the title or a long screech appearing at every other page turn prompt young audiences to chime in on the noise. It all starts when a deer driving a yellow roadster while reading (a book, not a cellphone) hits a garbage can (“BANG”), then takes a rear-end hit from a hog driving a truck full of chickens (“BANG”) who become festooned with fashion accessories after a collision (“BANG”) with the giraffe on the way home from the store, and so on. Subsequent tailgating motorists shower the growing chaos with tires, fish, veggies, little bunnies, paint and, in a climactic four-page foldout panorama, ice cream. Just to give the escalating catastrophe/frolic a more surreal air, Timmers wildly exaggerates his animal cast’s features and expressions and adds high-sheen highlights to the surfaces of his brightly colored, sharply defined scenes. Carping critics and motor-safety wonks may be displeased to see all of the victims laughing at the way their flying cargoes end up adorning all and sundry. The violence here is strictly cartoon-style though, with no harm done and ice cream for all at the end.
A cautionary tale on the hazards of distracted driving? If anything, just the opposite, but it’s sure a lot of fun. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-8775-7918-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Gecko Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
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A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity.
Buzz and his buzzy buddy open a spinoff series of nonfiction early readers with an aquarium visit.
Buzz: “Like other fish, sharks breathe through gills.” Fly Guy: “GILLZZ.” Thus do the two pop-eyed cartoon tour guides squire readers past a plethora of cramped but carefully labeled color photos depicting dozens of kinds of sharks in watery settings, along with close-ups of skin, teeth and other anatomical features. In the bite-sized blocks of narrative text, challenging vocabulary words like “carnivores” and “luminescence” come with pronunciation guides and lucid in-context definitions. Despite all the flashes of dentifrice and references to prey and smelling blood in the water, there is no actual gore or chowing down on display. Sharks are “so cool!” proclaims Buzz at last, striding out of the gift shop. “I can’t wait for our next field trip!” (That will be Fly Guy Presents: Space, scheduled for September 2013.)
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity. (Informational easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-50771-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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