This original tale was suggested by The Storytelling Stone, a traditional Seneca tale, and explains how stories began. In the time before people told stories, Papa tended goats and played the flute while Mama cooked and cared for two children and wove tapestries. One day she sends the boy to pick strawberries; when his pail is full he sits down on a flat rock where a snake lies coiled. The snake offers stories in exchange for the berries, weaving his tales of how the stars were once bees and why monkeys live in trees. Arriving home with an empty pail, the boy tells his mother a snake ate them. Next, the girl is sent to pick raspberries and the same thing happens. No berries for dinner. When Mama sends them both to pick apples, the snake tells more tales and swallows half the apples. When Papa tells about seeing a strange lumpy snake, the children laugh and retell all of the snake’s stories. The pages are filled with Heo’s (Sometimes I’m Bombaloo, p. 53, etc.) familiar stylized illustrations of pencil and oil, with swirls, circular patterns of images, and dome-shaped trees. The folksiness of the artwork matches the charming story. The double spread with the large, red snake with many lumps will have kids giggling. Ripe for a storyteller’s voice. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-439-31769-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
Hee haw.
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. 28, 2018
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