This almost-wordless picture book will appeal to young children who are experts at “reading” pictures, but their execution...
Syndicated comic-strip artist Tatulli ("Lio" and "The Heart of the City") translates his signature style into a debut picture book about the power of imagination.
An alarm clock brriinnggs and a blond, blue-eyed, white boy named Henry wakes up and gets dressed. Everything seems unremarkable, save his cowboy hat and boots, both red, until Henry digs deep inside a cereal box for the promised prize and tumbles in. When he opens his eyes, he finds himself in a wonderland filled with Technicolor cereal mountains and milk rivers. This is just the first of Henry’s wacky daydreams. His overactive imagination engages just long enough for him to get into trouble before shouts of “Henry!…Daydreaming again!” jolt him out of his reveries. In class, Henry hang glides on alphabets to the sun and slides down the globe—right into a bookcase full of books. And during recess, a wild ride on a grasshopper lands him in the mud. In an unexpected metafictive twist, Henry and his adventures turn out to be part of an Asian girl’s daydreams. Visually, Tatulli creates an interesting assemblage of comic panels, white space, and variations in perspective to create a dynamic story. However, his illustrations may better suit black-and-white newsprint, as the combination of rough edges and dark pencil outlines with flat, relatively unmodulated application of color is jarring.
This almost-wordless picture book will appeal to young children who are experts at “reading” pictures, but their execution falls short. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62672-354-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
An innocuous telling, sure to slip in effortlessly with other firetruck books.
A little fire engine discovers what it’s good at by eliminating what it is not.
Who knew disappointment could be such a keen teaching tool? Narrator Flash is eager to demonstrate firefighting prowess, but every attempt to “save the day” yields bubkes. First Flash is too little to handle a fire at the airport (Crash, an airport crash tender, handles that one). Next Flash is too short to help a tall building that’s on fire (that honor goes to Laddie, a turntable ladder). Finally, an airplane and a foam tender together solve a forest-fire problem. Only when a bridge is suddenly blocked by snow, with all the other trucks on the wrong side of it, does Flash have the opportunity to save a pet shelter that’s ablaze. (Readers will note characters in shirtsleeves at the beginning of the book, so this is a very unexpected snowstorm.) Calvert deftly finds a new way to introduce kids to different kinds of firefighting vehicles by setting up Flash in opposition to situations where it’s just not the best truck for the job. The anthropomorphized engines and planes irritatingly include unnecessary eyelashes on trucks with feminine pronouns, but this is mitigated by the fact that the girls get cool names like “Crash” and save the day first. Enthusiastic if unremarkable digital art presents both firefighters and citizens in an array of genders and races.
An innocuous telling, sure to slip in effortlessly with other firetruck books. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4178-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Arrr, ’tis a seaworthy tale, so set your compass toward fulfilling your dreams, and she’ll not steer you wrong.
A simple ship yields a (relatively) big adventure in this classically told tale.
In a little cabin on a little lake, there lives a mouse named Mabel, a boy, and a man. The man constructs a very special model ship. “He wouldn’t even let the boy help.” Every night when she looks at it, Mabel wonders if the ship is seaworthy. She lets herself dream of piloting it through seas both rough and calm, “free and full of wonder.” When an opportunity presents itself, Mabel hesitates but reasons that the chance may never come again. Readers will be relieved to find that the ship does indeed float, but when the ship meets with tragedy, both Mabel and the man will need to find a solution. Jonker cleverly juxtaposes the mouse’s character arc alongside that of the grown man. Whereas Mabel must summon the courage to live her dreams, the man must overcome his fear of letting other people help him with his own. Cordell, meanwhile, outlines panels with rope, then fills his images to the brim with a busy cross-hatching technique that gives the book a timeless feel. Both boy and man in the book have light-brown skin.
Arrr, ’tis a seaworthy tale, so set your compass toward fulfilling your dreams, and she’ll not steer you wrong. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780593350577
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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