Another child-friendly nature book from the team that offered Animals in Motion (2000), this one has added bite. With no graphic violence, but a deliciously close attention to toothy detail, Stephens paints oversized, in-your-face views of a gaping crocodile, a python swallowing an entire deer, a lamprey's stuff-of-nightmare mouth, and other creature features that will rivet browsers—of the human sort, anyway. Hickman contributes notes and diagrams on the various kinds of teeth, jaws, beaks, tongues, and baleen sported by herbivores, carnivores, and carrion-eaters, adding a look at diverse strategies for taking in nourishment and water. Directions for low-tech demonstrations will help children understand food webs, how a frog's tongue works, a housefly's decidedly icky eating habits and like topics. Seasoned with well-chosen examples and scientific terms, this clear, non-technical study will afford plenty of food for thought—though the lack of a book or Web site list will give readers hoping for leads to further information a bone to pick with the author. (index) (Nonfiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55074-577-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
Chasing his last ball down into the town sewer, Stan brings back a noxious, dripping lump that not only disgusts and...
A pet iguana flushed down a toilet, a scientist’s unwelcomed potion for giant Brussels sprouts, a sociopathic dog named Mr. Snuggles and a reeking glob of slime that turns out not to be a baseball are but some of the elements in this Captain Underpants–style yuck-o-rama.
Chasing his last ball down into the town sewer, Stan brings back a noxious, dripping lump that not only disgusts and interests everyone at school but brings his long-lost pet Fluffy—grown to dinosaurian proportions—back to the surface in rampaging pursuit. The author loses few opportunities to drag references to Dumpsters, rotting food, underwear, farts and like subgenre tropes into a plot thick with mishaps, chases and melodramatic cliffhangers. Oddly, despite crafting a tale and cast that are both liberally smeared with muck, he seems to regard any specific mention of what goes into and comes out of sewers as taboo, but you could cut the innuendo with a knife. Tableaux done as large, simple line drawings featuring the annoyed-looking monster and hunched, hapless-looking smaller figures on nearly every page give the tale that fashionable Wimpy Kid lookPub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5977-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
You could cut the preciousness with a knife. Next up: Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy armies.
A long-eared guardian with a corps of fierce, chocolate warriors helps to rescue the kidnapped children of Santoff Claussen village in this sequel to Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King (2011).
When Pitch, the Nightmare King, sweeps all of the village’s children away to his lair at the Earth’s center, Cossack/mage Nicholas and his intrepid sidekick Katherine hie off to (where else?) Easter Island. There they solicit aid in their recovery from Bunnymund, last of the ageless Pookan Brotherhood and keeper of the second of the five Relics that must be gathered to ensure Pitch’s final defeat. Standing tall in designer shades and richly patterned robes, the “very egg-centric” but powerful lagomorph (inventor of Spring, jokes, chocolate and Australia) hops to. This sets the stage for a rousing subterranean dustup and, for Pitch, another hasty escape. As in the previous episode, Joyce mines common European cultural motifs and lays clever twists and resonances on the result, for a tale as stylized and baroque as the occasional illustrations.
You could cut the preciousness with a knife. Next up: Toothiana, Queen of the Tooth Fairy armies. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-3050-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2012
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