A (mostly) heartwarming follow-up visit.
In this wordless picture book, Frazee’s lonely farmer hosts another visitor from the train on the horizon.
The elderly White gent first met in The Farmer and the Clown (2014) walks home from a picnic, looking rather down, unaware he is being followed by a small monkey in a red fez and yellow frill around its neck. As he settles into his empty house, he notices the smiling monkey at the window. He lets the monkey in the front door, but after a dizzying spread depicting the monkey running amok, the farmer sends the monkey out. The frowning monkey spends the night outside as snow begins to fall. The farmer awakes to deep snow and immediately goes out to rescue the monkey. After a warm fire, soup, a story, and falling asleep on the farmer’s shoulder, the monkey spends two nights at the farmer’s house; on the day in between, the farmer and his animals tolerate the monkey’s loud, wild ways. Finally, like the clown in the book before him, the monkey hears the circus train coming and goes on its way, smiles all around. Frazee’s soft colors, careful lines, and masterful compositions work their magic once again to evoke mood and feeling in a way that children can immediately grasp. The experience hits adult readers just as powerfully, though readers who decry picture-book depictions of monkeys for reinforcing negative stereotypes of Black people will find no mitigation in the monkey’s antics. (This book was reviewed digitally with 8.3-by-20.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 54.1% of actual size.)
A (mostly) heartwarming follow-up visit. (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-4619-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre.
Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.
The family picnic is today. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s; her Groundling father appears to be a white human. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. Desperate to avoid this, Lina and her friend Claudia, who is black, get Lina accepted at the Hilltop Science and Arts Academy. Lina’s parents allow her to go as long as she does lessons with grandpa on Saturdays. However, fitting in at a Groundling school is rough, especially when your powers start freak winter storms! With the story unfurling in diary format, bright-pink–highlighted grayscale illustrations help move the plot along. There are slight gaps in the storytelling and the pacing is occasionally uneven, but Lina is full of spunk and promotes self-acceptance.
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-35393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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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