Comfortingly familiar and intriguingly different at the same time, this trip to the market and back again will carry readers...
Mama Jumbo is a pachyderm inhabitant of Zanzibar Road, in an imaginary country that may or may not be South Africa.
Wearing her “Flippy-floppy, flappy-slippy, this-way-that-way pompom” hat, she leaves Little Chico (her chicken child) at home with bow-tie–wearing lion Bro Vusi and goes to market in a brightly painted taxi van. She sees all her animal friends selling and buying produce, beads, mirrors, sunglasses, clothing, pottery and crafts, a mixture of traditional southern African and modern Western goods. Mama Jumbo trades for some fruit-printed cloth and a mirror so that she can place her hat just so. When the taxi’s tire blows out, she fixes it with bubble gum and pumps it up with her trunk. At home, she makes a “tutti-frutti” shirt for Little Chico. The five short chapters bring back the characters from Welcome to Zanzibar Road (2006), and while there are no really dramatic moments, the very human animals are unfailingly polite, gently humorous and generous. The fun here is in the language and the details in the watercolor, pen and digital media illustrations, such as the expressive faces, the dog riding on a bicycle piled high with television sets and the mbiras (gourd thumb pianos) in the musical instruments stall.
Comfortingly familiar and intriguingly different at the same time, this trip to the market and back again will carry readers to a place filled with joie de vivre. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-68852-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
A stocking stuffer par excellence, just right for dishing up with milk and cookies.
Pigeon finds something better to drive than some old bus.
This time it’s Santa delivering the fateful titular words, and with a “Ho. Ho. Whoa!” the badgering begins: “C’mon! Where’s your holiday spirit? It would be a Christmas MIRACLE! Don’t you want to be part of a Christmas miracle…?” Pigeon is determined: “I can do Santa stuff!” Like wrapping gifts (though the accompanying illustration shows a rather untidy present), delivering them (the image of Pigeon attempting to get an oversize sack down a chimney will have little ones giggling), and eating plenty of cookies. Alas, as Willems’ legion of young fans will gleefully predict, not even Pigeon’s by-now well-honed persuasive powers (“I CAN BE JOLLY!”) will budge the sleigh’s large and stinky reindeer guardian. “BAH. Also humbug.” In the typically minimalist art, the frustrated feathered one sports a floppily expressive green and red elf hat for this seasonal addition to the series—but then discards it at the end for, uh oh, a pair of bunny ears. What could Pigeon have in mind now? “Egg delivery, anyone?”
A stocking stuffer par excellence, just right for dishing up with milk and cookies. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781454952770
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Union Square Kids
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
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
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