Losing that first tiny tooth is a huge event in the life of a child, celebrated here in this beginning easy reader from the I Can Read series. A little boy with curly blond hair is the first-person narrator, describing the condition of his loose tooth and his attempts to dislodge the tooth through wiggling and eating. The rhyming text is simple but clever, told in very short sentences with repeating sentence patterns and a catchy refrain. Wickstrom’s loose watercolors with thick outlines provide additional humor, with distinctly different looks for each member of the boy’s family. While this entry works well as a beginning easy reader, it will also be popular in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms as a read-aloud and will fit right in to story hours with dental themes. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-052776-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
Stinky, Smelly, Reeky, and Stenchy form a rock band and, to their delight, land a gig at the local teen center. The audience flees in disgust, but soon returns, sporting clothespins and chanting, ``Blay somb more songs . . . We lub you.'' The fetid foursome look more like badgers than skunks in the vigorously inked and brushed watercolors, and the plot seems rudimentary next to, say, Elise Primavera's The Three Dots (1993) or Graham Oakley's undeservedly scarce Frog Band stories. Still, Fair's debut shows promise and has obvious appeal to fans of The Stinky Cheese Man (1992) and other books of that odor. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-73572-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
This flight of imagination by Shelby (Homeplace, 1995, etc.) has a poignant cast. ``Someday,'' promises the narrator, ``we'll live in a house on a mountain. We'll sit on the roof and fill the sky with bubbles.'' ``Someday, we'll live in a house by the sea,'' or above a bakery, underground, even in space, and somehow, the melancholy implication is that there is no home just now. Folding warm colors together, Litzinger gives her paintings a cheerful aspect that lightens the tone rather than fighting it; three children, each with a different skin color, smile, and play in and around a small house that is adapted to different situations and is last seen with DNA-like strings of extra rooms twisting above the roof. Pair this with Eve Bunting's Fly Away Home (1991) or Elizabeth Hathorn's Way Home (1994) to set younger readers thinking. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-531-09510-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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