The furry soulmates who met, separated and reunited in Big Wolf & Little Wolf (2009) suffer another temporary parting. When Little Wolf chases after a luscious orange that Big Wolf throws a little too hard and then doesn’t come back, Big Wolf once again feels pangs of loneliness. He sets out to find his small blue companion—into a city that Tallec’s crowded, blocky, shadowed street scenes render particularly soulless, impersonal and, as darkness falls, scary. Big Wolf’s feelings are subtly cued but felt with uncommon sharpness: “Big Wolf went cold. He didn’t dare to think anything. Certainly not that Little Wolf wanted to leave him, or that he would never return, or any of the other strange and unbelievable things he might think.” Little Wolf, tubby and silent throughout, is an enigmatic figure, but the much larger Big Wolf is rendered with a nose, ears and body of sinuous, exaggerated length, and the changing curves and angles of his body language clearly capture the depth and intensity of his emotions. Despite a few disconnects between the text and the pictures, even younger readers will be caught up in Big Wolf’s odyssey and rejoice when he at last tracks down his errant buddy, and (after he gently tosses him the orange) they “lived happily together for a long, long time.” (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59270-106-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity.
Buzz and his buzzy buddy open a spinoff series of nonfiction early readers with an aquarium visit.
Buzz: “Like other fish, sharks breathe through gills.” Fly Guy: “GILLZZ.” Thus do the two pop-eyed cartoon tour guides squire readers past a plethora of cramped but carefully labeled color photos depicting dozens of kinds of sharks in watery settings, along with close-ups of skin, teeth and other anatomical features. In the bite-sized blocks of narrative text, challenging vocabulary words like “carnivores” and “luminescence” come with pronunciation guides and lucid in-context definitions. Despite all the flashes of dentifrice and references to prey and smelling blood in the water, there is no actual gore or chowing down on display. Sharks are “so cool!” proclaims Buzz at last, striding out of the gift shop. “I can’t wait for our next field trip!” (That will be Fly Guy Presents: Space, scheduled for September 2013.)
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity. (Informational easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-50771-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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