An early comic drills home the lesson that you never know how much you need someone until you find a friend.
Two wild critters navigate seasons along with the ups and downs of an unexpected friendship.
Tiny Fox lives in a valley with just an apple tree for companionship, and, “like most small animals, he went about his day believing he was happy.” All that changes when Great Boar arrives and plops down beneath the tree. Perturbed, Tiny Fox now has to share everything. When he leaves for a short time and returns, however, he discovers Great Boar is gone and a newfound loneliness has settled in his place. Happily, the two are reunited in the first story in this collection (“Here”), and as the seasons change (“Together” takes place during fall and winter, snowy weather continues in “Apart,” and “There” takes the pals into spring), the two learn to trust one another and, when called upon to do so, trust themselves as well. Watercolors capable of evoking not simply the splendor of a new dawn, but also this little book’s emotional pitch are wielded with surgical skill. The smallest dab of a line beneath an eye can indicate remorse or, more often, worry. This storyline provides an elegant bridge between picture books and graphic novels; for fans of similarly early, gentle comics like Fox and Rabbit by Beth Ferry (2020) and Bug Boys by Laura Knetzger (2020).
An early comic drills home the lesson that you never know how much you need someone until you find a friend. (Graphic early reader. 6-9)Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63715-020-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Oni Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Precious as the language sounds to modern ears (the term “nursery magic” alone will likely set the eyes of even preliterate listeners to rolling), Williams’ 1922 classic remains a read-aloud standard thanks to the way big themes of life, death and change weave through its seemingly small and largely familiar domestic events. In this sumptuous unabridged edition, Spirin plays to his strengths. Visual grace notes enclose every block of text within open borders composed of finely drawn, Art Nouveau–style curlicues and tiny, naturalistic floral arrangements. These give way to full-page or full-spread close-up views of a flaxen-haired lad with a distant gaze, a treasure house of upscale antique toys rendered in painstaking detail, a winged Fairy dripping flowers and posed in languid, Botticelli curves and a homely, increasingly grubby bunny that is transformed in the final scenes to a live rabbit bursting with lithe, long-limbed vitality. Rendered in semitransparent watercolor and colored pencil, the art has an ethereal look that misses out on the warm intimacy Michael Hague brought to his interpretation (1983; reprinted in 2008), but for technical accomplishment and stateliness overmatches Monique Felix’s similarly formal pictures (1994) or the plethora of less-memorable versions. (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5848-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The team that taught students about nouns and verbs, punctuation and silent letters now tackles suffixes…almost literally. On the last day of school, when Mr. Wright announces, “After lunch and our read-aloud, we’ll tackle word endings,” the anthropomorphized suffixes head to the gym to get into shape for the coming melee. Meanwhile, the kids’ atrocious behavior in the lunchroom leads Mr. Wright to skip the read-aloud and go directly to the lesson. Except the lesson has disappeared. Threatened with no summer vacation unless they find the word endings, the kids hang (suffix-less) wanted posters all over the school. Reassured of the students’ good intentions, the suffixes leave clues for them to decode and thus find them, saving not only the kids’ educations but summer vacation as well. As in the previous titles, the words in the text are printed in two colors, allowing the suffixes to stand out from the rest of the text. Reed’s now-signature acrylic-and-digital illustrations are as quirky and colorful as ever. Backmatter includes a page of spelling rules for adding endings to words and a page delineating some different suffixes and how their additions change the root word. While this may not be as strong as the previous titles from this duo, still it is a good addition to their language-arts series. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2296-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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