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DROOLING AND DANGEROUS

THE RIOT BROTHERS RETURN!

Hopping once again into the Captain’s Underpants, brothers Wilbur and Orville Riot return with more lame jokes and wild, goofy games. On “daily missions” that take them from chucking plastic bugs at each other and playing basketball with rolled-up dirty socks to declaring a “Dwitch Say” and wearing each other’s clothes, the two horse around at home, school and the local mall—“As soon as we got to the Gateway Shopping Mall, Mom went to one of those stinky lotion stores. Of course, it wasn’t called the Stinky Lotion Store, it was called the Smelly Slime Shop. Ha-ha!” What a pair of cards. Reined in by their mother, who isn’t above slipping a few plastic bugs into their food herself, the two do, at least, offer a happy picture of siblings getting along well, rather than squabbling or picking at each other. Lots of simply drawn cartoon vignettes add to the manic air, and along with such droll bons mots as “Life is boring when you’re not spying on someone,” the “rules” for many of the featured games are reprised at the end. A laugh Riot, with an obvious audience. (Fiction. 9-11)

Pub Date: May 15, 2006

ISBN: 0-8234-1986-X

Page Count: 177

Publisher: Holiday House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006

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KATT VS. DOGG

A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.

An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.

Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.

A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)

Pub Date: April 1, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019

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KENNY & THE DRAGON

Reports of children requesting rewrites of The Reluctant Dragon are rare at best, but this new version may be pleasing to young or adult readers less attuned to the pleasures of literary period pieces. Along with modernizing the language—“Hmf! This Beowulf fellow had a severe anger management problem”—DiTerlizzi dials down the original’s violence. The red-blooded Boy is transformed into a pacifistic bunny named Kenny, St. George is just George the badger, a retired knight who owns a bookstore, and there is no actual spearing (or, for that matter, references to the annoyed knight’s “Oriental language”) in the climactic show-fight with the friendly, crème-brulée-loving dragon Grahame. In look and spirit, the author’s finely detailed drawings of animals in human dress are more in the style of Lynn Munsinger than, for instance, Ernest Shepard or Michael Hague. They do, however, nicely reflect the bright, informal tone of the text. A readable, if denatured, rendition of a faded classic. (Fantasy. 9-11)

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-4169-3977-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008

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