This is Maurice Sendak's comic strip apotheosis of the Thirties/ dusky dream of sensual bliss/ bim bam boom bombshell of a child-echoing picture book. Sometimes Mickey's toss and turn from bed into the night kitchen and back keeps in time to internal rhyme, or sets up a rhythmic chant or a remembrance of things heard, or makes sport with words; while what's doing in the kitchen is the concoction of a cake by three Oliver Hardy cooks who take Mickey for milk until "right in the middle of the steaming and the making and the smelling and the baking Mickey poked through and said I'M NOT THE MILK AND THE MILK'S NOT ME! I'M MICKEY!" But wait: in his bread dough plane with his milk-pitcher helmet, Mickey flies up and up and up "and over the top of the Milky Way," then dives down into the bottle "singing 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me. God Bless Milk and God Bless Me!'" God bless naked and naturally exposed, Mickey is pure joy. . . or as the cooks chorus "MILK IN THE BATTER! MILK IN THE BATTER! WE BAKE CAKE! AND NOTHING'S THE MATTER!" (Can it go without saying that the pictures are superb.)
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1970
ISBN: 0064434362
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A gently whimsical rumination about compromise and friendship.
Stormy waters await two friends on the high seas.
In this follow-up to Kondo & Kezumi Visit Giant Island (2020), best pals Kondo and Kezumi are back in their tiny boat, sailing toward new adventures. Kondo wants to stick with their plans to visit Spaghetti Island, but Kezumi is easily distracted by nearby wonders. Her curiosity piqued, she longs to follow schools of carrot-colored, long-eared sea jumpers bounding out of the water and to explore a mysterious rusty ship. Kondo, however, is frustrated by Kezumi’s constant diversions, wishing to stay on course. When the duo shipwrecks on a strange new island, their tensions come to a head, and each stomps off angrily in opposite directions. Kezumi finds an immense broken warning bell and wants to fix it but cannot move it without Kondo’s help; will they be able to reconcile and work together? Adhering to stereotypes, Kondo, the yellow male character, is markedly larger and stockier than female Kezumi, who is orange, frilled, and slight. This quibble aside, Goodner and Tsurumi’s tale offers many alluringly adorable two-page illustrated spreads, with text divided into readably short chapters. The pacing pulls readers along like a swift current, and worldbuilding is playful and unexpected, dialing up the imagination and creating a new dimension for this tried-and-true friendship tale.
A gently whimsical rumination about compromise and friendship. (Fantasy. 7-10)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5473-3
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Free-wheeling follies with satiric digs aplenty.
Trouble comes to Trubble Town even before all the grown-ups are abducted by alien Berrymanalows.
Sharing with its predecessor, Squirrel Do Bad (2021), a decidedly free-associational style of plotting, cartoonist Pastis’ newest pits young Wendy the Wanderer and silent orphan Milo against numerous foes, from evil tycoon Moneybags McGibbons to a bunch of opportunistic children who elect themselves town bosses after their empty-headed parents vanish thanks to not one but two rival sets of lounge singers from the stars (the other being the Waynenootonians). In a random (if increasingly destructive) series of mishaps and catastrophes featuring, for example, a wrestling match between costumed ex–civil servant Nutman and town propagandist Scribby Von Scrivener atop a giant banana, the town ends up leveled…but at least both the useless grown-ups and the bad kids are sent away together on a long trip, the aliens are driven off before they can perform, and Milo and Wendy are left to rebuild with the few remaining residents, mostly animals. In the appropriately manic art, the aliens resemble vegetables dressed, in some of the more frightening panels, as Elvis impersonators, while Wendy, flaunting a mop of purple hair, and the rest of the dot-eyed human cast present in a subtle range of skin colors.
Free-wheeling follies with satiric digs aplenty. (Graphic humor. 9-13)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9614-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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