Depicted with fixed, wide eyes and a maniacal grin in Garwood's cartoon illustrations, Zanny dashes with a touch-activated...
A hyperbolic portrait of a lad who operates only at top speed is paired to a bug-ridden recognition game.
Depicted with fixed, wide eyes and a maniacal grin in Garwood's cartoon illustrations, Zanny dashes with a touch-activated "Wahoo!" through the house and a cloud of thrown breakfast cereal, then past slower children and various animals who exhaust themselves trying to keep up. Ultimately, watched over by fond parents, he zooms along to a total crash at bedtime. Each scene features both automatic and touch-activated animations and sound effects. There is also a disappearing menu that includes a strip of page images and on-off switches for the auto-advance, the unobtrusive background music and the forcibly cheery audio narration. The less-than-inspired rhymed text runs to lines like "Swifter than a cheetah / even when he's sick. / Quick Quick Quick, Quick Quick Quick Quick." The app also includes a "Feelings Game" designed to provide practice in identifying facial expressions—but that provides disappointingly ambiguous choices in several cases.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2010
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Extra Special Kids
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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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