Pet lovers and nature lovers alike will enjoy this offbeat and entertaining tale.
Moose are not necessarily the best pets—except when it really matters.
Wilfred carefully teaches his moose, whom he names Marcel, all the rules for being a good pet. Marcel follows some of them. He knows to be quiet when Wilfred is listening to music, for example, but sometimes he roams too far from home. Still, Marcel is a good companion, providing shelter in the rain and reaching high into trees for fruit. Then calamity strikes. Wilfred discovers that Marcel actually belongs to another, causing Wilfred to run home in anger and get lost. To the rescue comes Marcel the moose, strutting nobly on his four thin but strong legs. The boy learns a valuable lesson about wild animals: “[P]erhaps…he’d never really owned the moose anyway.” Jeffers has set his cautionary tale in the beautiful Rocky Mountains using “a mishmash of oil painting onto old linotype and painted landscapes and a bit of technical wizardry thrown into the mix.” The result is an eye-catching and imaginative book with illustrations that vary from close-ups of the imposing moose against a white background to landscapes of the moose standing tall in his very own Albert Bierstadt painting.
Pet lovers and nature lovers alike will enjoy this offbeat and entertaining tale. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-16103-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity.
Buzz and his buzzy buddy open a spinoff series of nonfiction early readers with an aquarium visit.
Buzz: “Like other fish, sharks breathe through gills.” Fly Guy: “GILLZZ.” Thus do the two pop-eyed cartoon tour guides squire readers past a plethora of cramped but carefully labeled color photos depicting dozens of kinds of sharks in watery settings, along with close-ups of skin, teeth and other anatomical features. In the bite-sized blocks of narrative text, challenging vocabulary words like “carnivores” and “luminescence” come with pronunciation guides and lucid in-context definitions. Despite all the flashes of dentifrice and references to prey and smelling blood in the water, there is no actual gore or chowing down on display. Sharks are “so cool!” proclaims Buzz at last, striding out of the gift shop. “I can’t wait for our next field trip!” (That will be Fly Guy Presents: Space, scheduled for September 2013.)
A first-rate sharkfest, unusually nutritious for all its brevity. (Informational easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-50771-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Chilling in the best ways.
When a young rabbit who’s struggling in school finds a helpful crayon, everything is suddenly perfect—until it isn’t.
Jasper is flunking everything except art and is desperate for help when he finds the crayon. “Purple. Pointy…perfect”—and alive. When Jasper watches TV instead of studying, he misspells every word on his spelling test, but the crayon seems to know the answers, and when he uses the crayon to write, he can spell them all. When he faces a math quiz after skipping his homework, the crayon aces it for him. Jasper is only a little creeped out until the crayon changes his art—the one area where Jasper excels—into something better. As guilt-ridden Jasper receives accolade after accolade for grades and work that aren’t his, the crayon becomes more and more possessive of Jasper’s attention and affection, and it is only when Jasper cannot take it anymore that he discovers just what he’s gotten himself into. Reynolds’ text might as well be a Rod Serling monologue for its perfectly paced foreboding and unsettling tension, both gentled by lightly ominous humor. Brown goes all in to match with a grayscale palette for everything but the purple crayon—a callback to black-and-white sci-fi thrillers as much as a visual cue for nascent horror readers. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Chilling in the best ways. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6588-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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