This amusing book gives children a chance to play with their food without being reprimanded and without making a mess. The dutch-door pages allow readers to turn the top or bottom of the page to arrive at some strange combinations: ``Do you like jelly in your bed?'' or ``Do you like ice cream on your head?'' The artwork is saturated with color, the images pleasing, direct, and graphically elegant, and the typeface good and bold. The emphasis here is clearly on fun, but children will also enjoy making the correct choices, with color-coded pages to help them along. The book is sturdy, with pages of stout, spiral-bound stock. ``Do you like toothpaste on your apple pie?'' Probably not, but the subtext is clever: Eating and reading are adventures—go for it. (Picture book. 2-5)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-590-93106-7
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Cartwheel/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
Skip it
This book wants to be feminist.
Princess Penelope Pineapple, illustrated as a white girl with dark hair and eyes, is the Amelia Bloomer of the Pineapple Kingdom. She has dresses, but she prefers to wear pants as she engages in myriad activities ranging from yoga to gardening, from piloting a plane to hosting a science fair. When it’s time for the Pineapple Ball, she imagines wearing a sparkly pants outfit, but she worries about Grand Lady Busyboots’ disapproval: “ ‘Pants have no place on a lady!’ she’d say. / ‘That’s how it has been, and that’s how it shall stay.’ ” In a moment of seeming dissonance between the text and art, Penny seems to resolve to wear pants, but then she shows up to the ball in a gown. This apparent contradiction is resolved when the family cat, Miss Fussywiggles, falls from the castle into the moat and Princess Penelope saves her—after stripping off her gown to reveal pink, flowered swimming trunks and a matching top. Impressed, Grand Lady Busyboots resolves that princesses can henceforth wear whatever they wish. While seeing a princess as savior rather than damsel in distress may still seem novel, it seems a stretch to cast pants-wearing as a broadly contested contemporary American feminist issue. Guthrie and Oppenheim’s unimaginative, singsong rhyme is matched in subtlety by Byrne’s bright illustrations.
Skip it . (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2603-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Karlin (The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat, 1996, etc.) echoes Dick, Jane, and Sally—``I see the can. I can kick the can''—but the resemblance is fleeting, for the wordplay in this I-Can-Read entry is clever and bright. Young readers will be amused at the flurry of homonyms—``I can see a fly fly'' among them. There are excursions into past and present, and pokes at pronouns and the and a. Anchoring the book, which is narrated by two kittens, is the word ``seesaw.'' Karlin breaks it up, twists it around, and generally makes merry with the word's many possibilities. ``Look, a saw,'' says one kitten. ``I can see the saw,'' replies the other. ``I can saw the seesaw.'' But a frog gets the last lick: ``And I saw you saw the seesaw''—a grammatically slick tongue-twister. Simple watercolor illustrations crisply depict the meaning of the words, cutting through the ambiguity, and leaving readers with nothing but the purest pleasure. (Picture book. 3-5)
Pub Date: May 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-026677-5
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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