A charming tale of friendship between dogs and the love of owners who understand their pets.
Sashi, the formerly shy sheltie, returns to welcome a new misbehaving brother into her family in Greiner’s (Sashi, The Scared Little Sheltie, 2015) second picture book.
Sashi knows what it’s like to be unwanted. She was a rescue dog when Anna and her mother adopted her. After a few years, Sashi’s humans decide to foster rescue dogs until they find permanent homes. Well-trained and confident in her place among her humans, Sashi makes sure the foster dogs know that she’s the princess of the house. Some of the foster dogs teach her fun tricks, like climbing snowdrifts. Others—like the one who chases a “laser light toy”—just seem strange. But none challenges her ability to rule her home as much as Buddy. An oversized and rambunctious sheltie, Buddy had to leave his original home due to his bad behavior. At first, he annoys Sashi with his antics, and she chases him in punishment. Soon she realizes that the chasing is just part of the game, and she forgets about being a princess—she just has fun. When Buddy misbehaves when meeting with prospective adopters, Anna and her mom realize that Buddy just doesn’t want to leave Sashi. Spicer’s brightly colored illustrations give each sheltie a unique personality, and the pages where Buddy is winning over Sashi show Sashi’s development from reluctance to play with this new dog to joy at finding a playmate. Each page is dense with text, making the book better for independent grade school readers or very patient lap readers. The vocabulary may include words and phrases unfamiliar to young readers (“adoption,” “rowdy,” “behaviors,” “in spite of herself”), but the meanings are clear in context. Greiner’s passion for shelties and rescue dogs comes through clearly in the story, and she shows the types of roles that rescue shelties can take on after adoption, whether as therapy dogs, helpers in a store, or simply loving pets. An endnote describes the breed, and the author’s bio promises that proceeds from the book’s sale will go toward Sheltie Rescue.
A charming tale of friendship between dogs and the love of owners who understand their pets.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Brown Books Kids
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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