With that big ball of cheese hanging so temptingly in the sky, what’s a pair of hungry mice to do?
Marching to a pared-down rhyme of just three or four words per line, Alpaugh’s cute and capable mice determinedly gather tools and materials, design and build a rocket, and blast off. They touch down on a surface more like Roquefort than regolith and emerge from the capsule, equipped with a cleverly designed lunar backhoe: “Landing, standing / on the moon. / that’s one small step— / and one big spoon!” After they’ve stuffed themselves, there’s nothing left for an astonished young human astronomer back on Earth to see but a thin crescent. Presenting white, this child gapes up at the suddenly no-longer-full moon as the mouse astronauts tow their reentry capsule—and one last piece of moon—off the page. There’s lots of humor on the pages, from the mice wielding full-size human tools to a cheese-loving stowaway ant. A Right Stuff head-on view of the spacesuited mice, helmets under their arms, is particularly chuckleworthy. The venture recalls Andy Mansfield’s Journey to the Moon (2015), with its similarly cheesy climax, but it also pairs well with other extraterrestrial trips such as Dan Yaccarino’s Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I’m Off to the Moon! (1997; tragically, out of print) and Nancy Shaw and Margo Apple’s Sheep Blast Off! (2008).
A winner for young sky watchers with stars…or cheese…in their eyes. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8075-7553-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Hee haw.
30
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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. 29, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Robo-parents Diode and Lugnut present daughter Cathode with a new little brother—who requires, unfortunately, some assembly.
Arriving in pieces from some mechanistic version of Ikea, little Flange turns out to be a cute but complicated tyke who immediately falls apart…and then rockets uncontrollably about the room after an overconfident uncle tinkers with his basic design. As a squad of helpline techies and bevies of neighbors bearing sludge cake and like treats roll in, the cluttered and increasingly crowded scene deteriorates into madcap chaos—until at last Cath, with help from Roomba-like robodog Sprocket, stages an intervention by whisking the hapless new arrival off to a backyard workshop for a proper assembly and software update. “You’re such a good big sister!” warbles her frazzled mom. Wiesner’s robots display his characteristic clean lines and even hues but endearingly look like vaguely anthropomorphic piles of random jet-engine parts and old vacuum cleaners loosely connected by joints of armored cable. They roll hither and thither through neatly squared-off panels and pages in infectiously comical dismay. Even the end’s domestic tranquility lasts only until Cathode spots the little box buried in the bigger one’s packing material: “TWINS!” (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-22-inch double-page spreads viewed at 52% of actual size.)
A retro-futuristic romp, literally and figuratively screwy. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-544-98731-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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