Story after story of silly surprises and sounds.
Apartment occupants crane their necks and wonder what’s making all the ruckus, while readers, conveyed up from floor to floor, get a voyeuristic view inside each apartment and see exactly what’s making all that noise.
A brown-skinned child with close-cropped, textured black hair, asleep in the dark, bolts upright with the first startling sounds, stands on the bed, and asks the ceiling, “What’s going LALALA above my head?” A close-up cross section of the building shows the child’s room as well as a partial view of the upstairs apartment from its occupant’s waist down. What would be “going LALALA” in orange-striped trousers and shoes with spats? A page turn reveals a flamboyant white opera singer belting out notes before a music stand, his wild hair a corona of corkscrews. Below his feet and floorboards, readers see the top portion of the child’s blue walls and the words, “A man is singing opera above my head.” Each successive upper floor thrums (“ma ma ma,” “BAA BAA BAA,” “HAW HAW HAW”), lobbing delicious opportunities to enunciate at readers. Such punchy phonetic words beg to be mouthed loudly with lips, tongue, and jaw. Zany illustrations perfectly evoke cheek-by-jowl apartment living’s intimacies, frustrations, and absurdity and continue to surprise with the antics happening one flight up. Variously patterned wallpapers exemplify the particular personalities of the building’s inhabitants, who vary in color, age, temperament—even species.
Story after story of silly surprises and sounds. (Picture book. 2-6)Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59643-967-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unimpeachable.
A nearly wordless exploration of Aesop’s fable of symbiotic mercy that is nothing short of masterful.
A mouse, narrowly escaping an owl at dawn, skitters up what prove to be a male lion’s tail and back. Lion releases Mouse in a moment of bemused gentility and—when subsequently ensnared in a poacher’s rope trap—reaps the benefit thereof. Pinkney successfully blends anthropomorphism and realism, depicting Lion’s massive paws and Mouse’s pink inner ears along with expressions encompassing the quizzical, hapless and nearly smiling. He plays, too, with perspective, alternating foreground views of Mouse amid tall grasses with layered panoramas of the Serengeti plain and its multitudinous wildlife. Mouse, befitting her courage, is often depicted heroically large relative to Lion. Spreads in watercolor and pencil employ a palette of glowing amber, mouse-brown and blue-green. Artist-rendered display type ranges from a protracted “RRROAARRRRRRRRR” to nine petite squeaks from as many mouselings. If the five cubs in the back endpapers are a surprise, the mouse family of ten, perched on the ridge of father lion’s back, is sheer delight.
Unimpeachable. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-01356-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses...
This tan-skinned, freckle-faced narrator extols her own virtues while describing the challenges of being of mixed race.
Protagonist Lilly appears on the cover, and her voluminous curly, twirly hair fills the image. Throughout the rhyming narrative, accompanied by cartoonish digital illustrations, Lilly brags on her dark skin (that isn’t very), “frizzy, wild” hair, eyebrows, intellect, and more. Her five friends present black, Asian, white (one blonde, one redheaded), and brown (this last uses a wheelchair). This array smacks of tokenism, since the protagonist focuses only on self-promotion, leaving no room for the friends’ character development. Lilly describes how hurtful racial microaggressions can be by recalling questions others ask her like “What are you?” She remains resilient and says that even though her skin and hair make her different, “the way that I look / Is not all I’m about.” But she spends so much time talking about her appearance that this may be hard for readers to believe. The rhyming verse that conveys her self-celebration is often clumsy and forced, resulting in a poorly written, plotless story for which the internal illustrations fall far short of the quality of the cover image.
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses the mark on both counts. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63233-170-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Eifrig
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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