An assortment of tap-activated giggling elves, color changes and sound effects adorning the cartoon illustrations don’t...
A muddle indeed, this unstable and badly designed holiday minitale will spread more frustration than cheer.
In the nonsensical storyline, Santa has only just returned from his Christmas rounds when the head elf discovers that the pages of the toy-delivery list have been mixed up. Santa dispatches seven elf-driven sleighs to the various continents to make amends—leading to a simple matching game in which viewers can select only Europe, Australia or North America on a world map. The text differs slightly depending on the choice, but the quartet of child recipients (all white) and gifts to be dragged into place are the same for each. The app has a strong tendency to crash at various points or if paged too quickly—and there’s no thumbnail index, so the story has to be started from the beginning every time. Moreover, instructions for the first matching game (putting elves in their sleighs) sometimes appear a screen or two beyond the game itself, and bookmarked screens will sometimes flash past out of sequence. Children can opt for either silent reading mode or a dispirited audio narration; in either case, the rhymed text appears just one verse at a time and must be tapped for the next to show.
An assortment of tap-activated giggling elves, color changes and sound effects adorning the cartoon illustrations don’t compensate for fundamental flaws in execution. (iPad holiday app. 5-7)Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hamson Design
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2012
Give this child’s-eye view of a day at the beach with an attentive father high marks for coziness: “When your ball blows across the sand and into the ocean and starts to drift away, your daddy could say, Didn’t I tell you not to play too close to the waves? But he doesn’t. He wades out into the cold water. And he brings your ball back to the beach and plays roll and catch with you.” Alley depicts a moppet and her relaxed-looking dad (to all appearances a single parent) in informally drawn beach and domestic settings: playing together, snuggling up on the sofa and finally hugging each other goodnight. The third-person voice is a bit distancing, but it makes the togetherness less treacly, and Dad’s mix of love and competence is less insulting, to parents and children both, than Douglas Wood’s What Dads Can’t Do (2000), illus by Doug Cushman. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-00361-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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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