Jazz Fly and his band are back (The Jazz Fly, 2000) for a bilingual adventure: a tropical-rainforest gig plus car trouble. Using his “Jazz-Spanish” phrase book, he enlists a sleepy sloth, a hyperactive monkey and an obliging macaw, alighting at the Termite Nook in time. His quartet’s grooves are interrupted dramatically when an anteater literally crashes the party. A message—a second language enriches life—is overplayed, but the cross-cultural interplay of scat and Latin rhythms wins out. A funkified layer of elementary science, delivered winkingly, adds a soupçon of cool. “On till dawn, the two bands played. Larvae danced. A thousand eggs were laid.” The accompanying CD is positively integral: Gollub’s band’s Latin jazz arrangements are—unusual for children’s music—actually tight. The narration’s occasionally shrill, but Gollub’s iteration of the chorus (“CHOO-ka CHOO-ka TING. ¡Ay, caramba! ¿Cómo cómo llego a la CHOO-ka pachanga?”) is required hearing for anyone aspiring to read this text aloud (which is a must). Hanke supplies breezy, computer-enhanced illustrations, delivering swarming details from diaphanous wings to pools of ambient lighting to bug eyes extraordinaire. ¡Qué bueno! (author’s note) (Picture book/CD. 5-8)
Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-889910-44-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tortuga Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
One of the watershed moments in African-American history—the defeat of James Braddock at the hands of Joe Louis—is here given an earnest picture-book treatment. Despite his lack of athletic ability, Sammy wants desperately to be a great boxer, like his hero, getting boxing lessons from his friend Ernie in exchange for help with schoolwork. However hard he tries, though, Sammy just can’t box, and his father comforts him, reminding him that he doesn’t need to box: Joe Louis has shown him that he “can be the champion at anything [he] want[s].” The high point of this offering is the big fight itself, everyone crowded around the radio in Mister Jake’s general store, the imagined fight scenes played out in soft-edged sepia frames. The main story, however, is so bent on providing Sammy and the reader with object lessons that all subtlety is lost, as Mister Jake, Sammy’s father, and even Ernie hammer home the message. Both text and oil-on-canvas-paper illustrations go for the obvious angle, making the effort as a whole worthy, but just a little too heavy-handed. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58430-161-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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