“In the early times, some were clever and some were foolish. The Cat was one of the clever ones. The mice were mostly foolish.” So begins MacDonald’s latest folktale retelling, this one from the Limba people of Sierra Leone. When the Cat invites the mice to join the secret Cat Society, they are only too pleased and cheerfully line themselves up for the “initiation march” while the Cat scoops them up and puts them in her sack. Luckily for the mice, there is one clever one, Mabela, who remembers her father’s sage advice and escapes from the Cat just in time, rescuing the other mice as the Cat languishes in a thorn bush. The energetic text is trademark MacDonald (Pickin’ Peas, 1998, etc.), written purely to be read aloud, and punctuated by a chant that invites children to join in. Coffey’s (Red Berry Wool, 1999) saturated acrylics depict a vaguely African anthropomorphized world where animals live in grass huts. Bright borders set off the text blocks, and occasionally frame a detail, such as a tiny tongue sneaking out to lick a delicate chop when the cat greets the eager mice: “ ‘Oh, my, you have ALL arrived!’ said the Cat. ‘How delicious . . . I mean, how delightful.’ ” The Cat is orange, and her pointy green eyes protrude from the plane of her face, giving her a truly shifty-eyed (and somewhat disconcerting) look. Mabela herself is a little red mouse, whose enormous eyes dominate her bucktoothed face. The tale is somewhat moralizing at the end—“Limba grandparents say, ‘If a person is clever, it is because someone has taught them their cleverness’ ”—but children will respond nevertheless to this plucky little heroine who saves herself by her wits. (Picture book/folktale. 4-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8075-4902-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Charming characters, a clever plot and a quiet message tucked inside a humorous tale.
Fuzzy, bearlike creatures of different sizes relate to one another in an amusing story that explores the relative nature of size.
A small purple creature meets a similarly shaped but much larger orange critter. The purple creature maintains that the orange creature is “big”; the orange one counters by calling the purple one “small.” This continues, devolving into a very funny shouting match, pages full of each type of creature hollering across the gutter. This is followed by a show-stopping double-page spread depicting two huge, blue legs and the single word “Boom!” in huge display type. Tiny, pink critters then float down by parachute, further complicating the size comparisons. Eventually, these brightly colored animals learn to see things in a different way. In the end, they decide they are all hungry and trudge off to eat together. The story is told effectively with just a few words per page, though younger readers might need help understanding the size and perspective concepts. Cartoon-style illustrations in ink and watercolor use simple shapes with heavy black outlines set off by lots of white space, with an oversized format and large typeface adding to the spare but polished design. While the story itself seems simple, the concepts are pertinent to several important social issues such as bullying and racism, as well as understanding point of view.
Charming characters, a clever plot and a quiet message tucked inside a humorous tale. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4778-4772-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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