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
Walter is a modern boy in jeans and baseball cap who describes his uncle Roy’s ideal “job” as the captain of a pirate ship in this mildly amusing but ultimately unsuccessful mid-level easy reader. The narrator might be a 21st-century boy, but the pirates must be from a previous century because they’re clearly not a politically correct crew: lots of peg legs and eye patches, no ethnic diversity, and no women crew members. (Historically, there were a few women pirates.) The only female in the story is the narrator’s mother, shown in her dress and apron serving coffee to her husband, who is relaxing in his easy chair. Most problematic is the boss of all the pirates, who has a hook replacing one hand, a particular point of objection for advocates for the physically disabled, who have strongly objected to the negative stereotyping of prosthetic devices on pirates first evidenced with Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Albee’s (The Oreo Cookie Counting Book, not reviewed, etc.) text has a controlled vocabulary, but there is no structured pattern as stated in the specifications on the back cover for this level of easy reader. The text is not predictable from the illustrations, and much of the dry humor (Uncle Roy’s “office has a great view”—the ocean from the deck of the ship) will not be easily understood by new readers. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-307-26216-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Golden Books/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Horus wears jeans, a striped shirt, and a backpack like any other first grader, but he travels to school in a flying cup (flying saucers are so last century), because his school is on Mars. The students are different types of Martians: some green, some blue, some polka-dotted—and all funny. Corey, who made an auspicious debut with You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! (2000), offers Episode 1 of the First Graders from Mars series, which describes Horus’s reluctance to leave his martiangarten days behind to move on to first grade. He slurps his soup with the wrong tentacle, tangles with an overly confident Martian girl named Tera, and lands in the Beta reading group (rather than the Alpha group with nemesis Tera). Corey works some simple Martian-style language and clever puns into her story: the Martian kids sit in thinking capsules instead of desks, and the floating, polka-dotted teacher has eyes in the front and back of her head, and on both sides, too. Additional layers of punny humor enhance the full-color, cartoon-style illustrations by Teague (The Great Gracie Chase, p. 188, etc.) who finds something clever to add on every page. Horus has the real fears of any entering first grader, and this story will be popular with kindergarten and first-grade teachers and students, who will be waiting for Episode 2. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-439-26220-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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