A thoughtful tale for engineers young and old.
A story about what isn’t yet there…until it’s imagined by an industrious mouse!
It begins with a house, or perhaps with a warm, welcoming flame, or perhaps with the intrepid journey of a mouse who travels over a hill, across a river, and into an asparagus patch to find a home. But there isn’t a home…yet. First the mouse builds a stove around the flame, “to mark the spot where the chilliness wasn’t.” After an escape from a fox, the mouse builds a floor, marking a space “where the fox wouldn’t go.” A storm leads to a roof, and soon mouse has her house. A door is built, and unexpected guests fill the house with warm vegetable soup and friendship. Gentle, straightforward text and onomatopoeia recount the mouse’s efforts to envision what could be before it is there, learning from experience and creating the bones of a home in the empty space of the asparagus patch. Geometric artwork uses lines in all kinds of forms to evoke the stability of home and the uncertainty of travel; the mouse and her friends are simply yet effectively portrayed, conveying a childlike yet classic quality to the illustrations. A primarily earth-toned palette is peppered with tiny, colorful details throughout. The concentric halos around a candle on a deep blue spread are particularly poignant. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-16.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
A thoughtful tale for engineers young and old. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-286619-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories.
Kids know vegetables can be scary, but rarely are edible roots out to get someone. In this whimsical mock-horror tale, carrots nearly frighten the whiskers off Jasper Rabbit, an interloper at Crackenhopper Field.
Jasper loves carrots, especially those “free for the taking.” He pulls some in the morning, yanks out a few in the afternoon, and comes again at night to rip out more. Reynolds builds delicious suspense with succinct language that allows understatements to be fully exploited in Brown’s hilarious illustrations. The cartoon pictures, executed in pencil and then digitally colored, are in various shades of gray and serve as a perfectly gloomy backdrop for the vegetables’ eerie orange on each page. “Jasper couldn’t get enough carrots … / … until they started following him.” The plot intensifies as Jasper not only begins to hear the veggies nearby, but also begins to see them everywhere. Initially, young readers will wonder if this is all a product of Jasper’s imagination. Was it a few snarling carrots or just some bathing items peeking out from behind the shower curtain? The ending truly satisfies both readers and the book’s characters alike. And a lesson on greed goes down like honey instead of a forkful of spinach.
Serve this superbly designed title to all who relish slightly scary stories. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-0297-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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