A reassuring message wrapped in rib-tickling humor.
A little boy learns he has nothing to fear from monsters as long as his baby sister is around.
“Everybody knows” that “monsters are afraid of babies!” In this sweet, wacky picture book, motley, frightful monsters become scared when confronted by a boy’s baby sister. As her brother looks on, the googly-eyed, lumpy, toothy, horned beasts of various sizes, shapes, and colors observe his little sister with alarm as she toddles through the house making messes, causing chaos, and bringing the monsters to tears by outdoing their “sticky and icky” and “loud and stinky” ways. Using comedy to calm children’s nighttime fears of monsters in the closet or under the bed and to help them see their maddening, drooling little sibling in a new light, the work is one of a series of three books launching a new publishing imprint by writer, director, and musician Tana (The Kitten, the Cat & the Apple, 2019, etc.). The loosely rhyming text is large and well spaced, and young readers and lapsitters will enjoy repeating the funny sound effects peppered throughout the story (“ERGG…DROOOOO…GUBB”). The team of Abbott and Leutwyler (King of Glee, 2019), which pictures the boy and his sister with beige-ish skin and dark brown eyes and hair—in the baby’s case, just one little curl spiraling up from the top of her head—has great fun with the witty depictions of the sadly intimidated monsters.
A reassuring message wrapped in rib-tickling humor.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950033-00-3
Page Count: 26
Publisher: New Classics Pr Llc
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
With the same delightfully irreverent spirit that he brought to his retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" (1987), Marshall enlivens another favorite. Although completely retold with his usual pungent wit and contemporary touches ("I don't mind if I do," says Goldilocks, as she tries out porridge, chair, and bed), Marshall retains the stories well-loved pattern, including Goldilocks escaping through the window (whereupon Baby Bear inquires, "Who was that little girl?"). The illustrations are fraught with delicious humor and detail: books that are stacked everywhere around the rather cluttered house, including some used in lieu of a missing leg for Papa Bear's chair; comically exaggerated beds—much too high at the head and the foot; and Baby Bear's wonderfully messy room, which certainly brings the story into the 20th century. Like its predecessor, perfect for several uses, from picture-book hour to beginning reading.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988
ISBN: 0140563660
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988
The greening of Dr. Seuss, in an ecology fable with an obvious message but a savingly silly style. In the desolate land of the Lifted Lorax, an aged creature called the Once-ler tells a young visitor how he arrived long ago in the then glorious country and began manufacturing anomalous objects called Thneeds from "the bright-colored tufts of the Truffula Trees." Despite protests from the Lorax, a native "who speaks for the trees," he continues to chop down Truffulas until he drives away the Brown Bar-ba-loots who had fed on the Tuffula fruit, the Swomee-Swans who can't sing a note for the smogulous smoke, and the Humming-Fish who had hummed in the pond now glumped up with Gluppity-Glupp. As for the Once-let, "1 went right on biggering, selling more Thneeds./ And I biggered my money, which everyone needs" — until the last Truffula falls. But one seed is left, and the Once-let hands it to his listener, with a message from the Lorax: "UNLESS someone like you/ cares a whole awful lot,/ nothing is going to get better./ It's not." The spontaneous madness of the old Dr. Seuss is absent here, but so is the boredom he often induced (in parents, anyway) with one ridiculous invention after another. And if the Once-let doesn't match the Grinch for sheer irresistible cussedness, he is stealing a lot more than Christmas and his story just might induce a generation of six-year-olds to care a whole lot.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1971
ISBN: 0394823370
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1971
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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