A feel-good digest of salutary sentiments, contradictory in spots but not overly earnest.
Homespun advice, Berenstain Bears style.
The art, drawn from many episodes in the long-running series of easy readers, is generally too generic to constitute a trip down Memory Lane for older fans, but despite frequent views of Mama Bear in her scandalously dated cap and housedress, it serves the accompanying pithy apothegms well enough. With occasional colloquial notes (“Don’t stress and give yourself a fright!”), the narrative offers a path to success and happiness paved with simple pleasures such as feeding ducks, taking naps…and occasionally cutting loose: “Lose your inhibitions” (illustrated with Brother and Sister Bear running around in their underwear); “Let yourself be a bit naughty” (trying on lipstick and shaving cream); and “Maybe it’s just time to par-tay” (the bears get down at what looks like a neighborhood block party). Elsewhere, such lines as “Beware procrastination,” “Never underestimate the value of hard work,” and “Get up and get going!” address readers uncomfortable with such seeming idleness. Still, despite a warning against too much TV (video games, internet) and a caution that the world is “full of sharks…and wolves,” the tone is positive overall and there is no heavy moralizing to dull the shiny precepts.
A feel-good digest of salutary sentiments, contradictory in spots but not overly earnest. (Picture book. 6-8, adult)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-274133-2
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Young readers will clamor to ride along.
Like an ocean-going “Lion and the Mouse,” a humpback whale and a snail “with an itchy foot” help each other out in this cheery travelogue.
Responding to a plaintive “Ride wanted around the world,” scrawled in slime on a coastal rock, whale picks up snail, then sails off to visit waters tropical and polar, stormy and serene before inadvertently beaching himself. Off hustles the snail, to spur a nearby community to action with another slimy message: “SAVE THE WHALE.” Donaldson’s rhyme, though not cumulative, sounds like “The house that Jack built”—“This is the tide coming into the bay, / And these are the villagers shouting, ‘HOORAY!’ / As the whale and the snail travel safely away. . . .” Looking in turn hopeful, delighted, anxious, awed, and determined, Scheffler’s snail, though tiny next to her gargantuan companion, steals the show in each picturesque seascape—and upon returning home, provides so enticing an account of her adventures that her fellow mollusks all climb on board the whale’s tail for a repeat voyage.
Young readers will clamor to ride along. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8037-2922-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
Silly reads for new readers to dig into.
A turnip-loving duck and its friends defend their garden.
Alas, the duck, sheep, dog, and donkey immediately discover the eponymous pest in the garden when it (a groundhog?) eats a row of beans. The duck is frantic that turnips are next, but instead the pest eats the sheep’s favorite crop: corn. Peas occupy the next row, and the pest gobbles them up, too. Instead of despairing, however, the donkey cries, “Yippee! He ate ALL THE PEAS!” and catching the others’ puzzled looks, continues, “I don’t like peas.” After this humorous twist, the only uneaten row is sown with turnips, and the duck leaps to devour them before the pest can do so. In a satisfying, funny conclusion, the duck beams when the dog, sheep, and donkey resolve to plant a new garden and protect it with a fence, only to find out that it will exclude not just the groundhog, but the duck, too. A companion release, What Is Chasing Duck?, has the same brand of humor and boldly outlined figures rendered in a bright palette, but its storyline doesn’t come together as well since it’s unclear why the duck is scared and why the squirrel that was chasing it doesn’t recognize the others when they turn and chase him at book’s end.
Silly reads for new readers to dig into. (Early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-94165-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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