A great read for anyone learning to grapple with the musicality of two languages at once, the book more than makes up for...
Words and phrases are bent, massaged, twisted, and thrown together in tricky sequences in this bilingual book about a competition for performers of tongue twisters.
With all the text offered in first Spanish, then English, the tournament participants—including a soccer player, a cat-wrangling Grumpy Granny, and a chupacabra (the famed Latin American goat-sucking creature)—lay down a set of twisty verses. How twisty? "María Marufa was roofing her roof / When asked by a roofer: / 'What do you roof, María Marufa? / Do you roof your own roof or another's roof?' / 'No, I roof not my roof nor another's roof. / I roof the roof of María Marufa." Each text-heavy page of Spanish and English faces a full-page portrait of the tongue-twister creator on stage, which adds a nice dimension of characterization to each offering. But the book's format is so rigid that each introduction is exactly the same, and the winning entry may strike some as far from the best of the bunch. Luckily, the twisters are well-translated; whether in English or Spanish, they read smoothly, and an additional 14 bonus twisters presented in their original languages in the backmatter keeps the fun going.
A great read for anyone learning to grapple with the musicality of two languages at once, the book more than makes up for the paltry story with the bounty of tongue-twisting treasures on offer. (Bilingual picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55885-832-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Piñata Books/Arte Público
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
There are many parallel legends – the seal women, for example, with their strange sad longings – but none is more direct than this American Indian story of a girl who is carried away in a horses’ stampede…to ride thenceforth by the side of a beautiful stallion who leads the wild horses. The girl had always loved horses, and seemed to understand them “in a special way”; a year after her disappearance her people find her riding beside the stallion, calf in tow, and take her home despite his strong resistance. But she is unhappy and returns to the stallion; after that, a beautiful mare is seen riding always beside him. Goble tells the story soberly, allowing it to settle, to find its own level. The illustrations are in the familiar striking Goble style, but softened out here and there with masses of flowers and foliage – suitable perhaps for the switch in subject matter from war to love, but we miss the spanking clean design of Custer’s Last Battle and The Fetterman Fight. 6-7
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0689845049
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bradbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
An all-day sugar rush, putting the “fun” back into, er, education.
A young visionary describes his ideal school: “Perfectly planned and impeccably clean. / On a scale, 1 to 10, it’s more like 15!”
In keeping with the self-indulgently fanciful lines of If I Built a Car (2005) and If I Built a House (2012), young Jack outlines in Seussian rhyme a shiny, bright, futuristic facility in which students are swept to open-roofed classes in clear tubes, there are no tests but lots of field trips, and art, music, and science are afterthoughts next to the huge and awesome gym, playground, and lunchroom. A robot and lots of cute puppies (including one in a wheeled cart) greet students at the door, robotically made-to-order lunches range from “PB & jelly to squid, lightly seared,” and the library’s books are all animated popups rather than the “everyday regular” sorts. There are no guards to be seen in the spacious hallways—hardly any adults at all, come to that—and the sparse coed student body features light- and dark-skinned figures in roughly equal numbers, a few with Asian features, and one in a wheelchair. Aside from the lack of restrooms, it seems an idyllic environment—at least for dog-loving children who prefer sports and play over quieter pursuits.
An all-day sugar rush, putting the “fun” back into, er, education. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-55291-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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