A one-trick pony—and the trick’s not all that great.
The Norwegian illustrator of My Father’s Arms Are a Boat (2013) pokes a pencil-sized hole through both covers and all 64 pages of this outing—but then doesn’t do much with it.
In very plain, nearly wordless line drawings with pale monochromatic highlights, Torseter depicts a cartoon figure (a lanky creature with a face like a hippo) who spots the hole in the wall of his new apartment. He chases it as it “moves” through various rooms and then plunks it in a box. He proceeds to “carry” it through a long sequence of city scenes—it does duty as sign lettering, wheels, eyes, lights and other items—to a laboratory, where it’s shoved into a drawer. The figure then walks obliviously home as the hole follows through the sky and ends up back in its original position on the apartment wall. Though the hole may take a moment to spot in some scenes, it is too small to have any significant visual impact. Nor, in contrast to the one in Hervé Tullet’s The Book with a Hole (2011) and other similarly pierced titles, is it placed or decorated in ways that will spark imaginative play or lead viewers to fresh considerations of their own surroundings.
A one-trick pony—and the trick’s not all that great. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59270-143-8
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
An intimate encounter with nature lit not just by stars and fireflies, but also an affecting dose of daddy-daughter warmth.
On a summer’s night, a child sails out into her yard to gather (and then release) lightning bugs.
Just like the stars that seem to wink and glimmer in Snyder’s moonlit, mist-streaked night skies, fireflies glow in the grass amid scattered trees and flowers. They smile in close-up views as the child, barefoot and nightgown-clad, gently gathers them into a big jar while her father looks on. Reflecting that “I love catching fireflies, / but they are not mine,” she cups each captive in her hand before “easy and slow, / I whisper good-bye, / then I let it go!” A spread of firefly facts caps the idyllic nighttime foray. Rough sparkly patches on the jacket add a tactile element that compensates, at least in part, for inner flaps that cover parts of the endpaper nightscapes. The bugs and brushwork resemble Eric Carle’s, but Snyder’s art works its own magic.
An intimate encounter with nature lit not just by stars and fireflies, but also an affecting dose of daddy-daughter warmth. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60905-291-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Blue Apple
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
These are spinoffs from a TV series that is itself a spinoff. Not surprisingly, the dilution of both visual and literary...
The Guess How Much I Love You franchise sets a low bar for its knockoff sequels.
Seeing dark clouds gather, Little Nutbrown Hare, Little Field Mouse, Little Grey Squirrel and Little Redwood Fox (who is, evidently, not very hungry) join Big Nutbrown Hare in a cave, then venture out after the storm to splash about and see a rainbow. The soft, intimate texture of the art in the original stories is gone, replaced by hard-edged, less finely drawn details and creatures depicted with generic postures and expressions. The animal figures are mechanically superimposed into the scenes in the manner of an animated cartoon and so float over the background meadows rather than run through them and stand atop rather than in the solid-looking puddles. With similar disregard for production values, in the co-published Snow Magic, Big and Little Nutbrown watch snow fall from a slightly misted moonlit sky, then with Little Field Mouse gambol over the drifts without appearing to touch them. In this second episode, Little Nutbrown’s mild character undergoes a sudden alteration as well: “[He] gave a crafty smile as he kicked his ball with another mighty kick. ‘Race you!’ ”
These are spinoffs from a TV series that is itself a spinoff. Not surprisingly, the dilution of both visual and literary quality goes beyond atrocious. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6993-5
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
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