Thoroughly misconceived and poorly executed.
An adverbial tour from sea to shining sea.
As in Sutton’s similarly constructed I Love You Animally (illustrated by Hazel Mitchell, 2015), the repetition of “I love you” quickly transforms sweet sentiment into monotonous litany. The text darts back and forth over the continent as the author struggles, with only fitful success, to find rhyming locales to highlight: “I love you energetically like NYC. // I love you simply like the stark Mohave. / I love you anciently like the Southwestern ruins. / I love you greatly like the Colorado dunes,” etc. Most of the selected adverbs are interchangeable anyway, and many are either arbitrary (“I love you diversely like the Texas Big Bend”) or esoteric. Greenburg’s simple images help out with some of the latter, such as “I love you duckily like the Public Garden’s flowers” (think Robert McCloskey), but the illustrator depicts a cannon instead of a “Gettysburg mortar,” forces a batter into a painfully awkward swing, and closes with a perfunctory map on which only a few of the journey’s stops appear. She does use a range of pinks and browns to color in the faces of her small human figures.
Thoroughly misconceived and poorly executed. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61067-511-6
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be...
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip.
The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface.
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel.
In this Japanese import, the first in a long-running series to appear in English, two girls ride bikes through a forest—with stops for clover-blossom tea and jam sandwiches.
It’s such a benign wood that Chirri and Chirra—depicted as a prim pair of identical twins with straight bob cuts—think nothing of sharing both a lunch spot and a nap beneath a tree with a bear and a rabbit. Moreover, at convenient spots along the way there is a forest cafe with a fox waiter plus “tables and chairs of all different size” to accommodate the diverse forest clientele, a bakery offering “bread in all different shapes and jam in all different colors,” and, just as the sun goes down, a forest hotel with similarly diverse keys and doors. That night a forest concert draws the girls and the hotel’s animal guests to their balconies to join in: “La-la-la, La-la-la. What a wonderful night in the forest!” Despite heavy doses of cute, the episode is saved from utter sappiness by the inclusive spirit of the forest stops and the delightfully unforced way that the girls offer greetings to a pair of honeybees at a tiny adjacent table in the cafe, show no anxiety at the spider dangling above their napping place, and generally accept their harmonious sylvan world as a safe and friendly place. Doi creates her illustrations with colored pencil, pastel, and crayon, crafting them to look like mid-20th-century lithographs.
A serene, feel-good outing with a cozy, old-fashioned feel. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59270-199-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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