Something of the tenderness of 1960s and ’70s picture books suffuses this bilingual tale of a young girl’s trip with her mother from tropical Latin America to Ohio to visit relatives. Lucy is excited to meet her extended family, but also notes the differences between her world of banana trees and flamingos and their Ohio farm, as well as the difficulties of not being able to make herself understood to English-only speakers. She especially wishes she could communicate her homesickness to Sparky, her cousin Robby’s dog. With Robby’s help, Lucy begins to learn English and to feel more at home. Chapra’s text and its accompanying Spanish translation, full of details and Lucy’s emotions, avoid the choppy simplicity of easy-reader texts for longer and more complex sentences, interweaving Spanish and English together where appropriate. Escrivá’s illustrations are detailed, lushly colored, and employ an accentuated roundness, especially in the over-sized heads of her characters, that combines realism and cartoon. Sweet, languid and full of family warmth, this is perhaps better suited to one-on-one parent-child readings than group read-alouds and should prove especially useful where immigration and separated families are part of the local fabric. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-053172-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2006
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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