THE WAR BETWEEN THE VOWELS AND THE CONSONANTS

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THE WAR BETWEEN THE VOWELS AND THE CONSONANTS

Name: THE WAR BETWEEN THE VOWELS AND THE CONSONANTS
Author: Priscilla Turner
ISBN: 0-374-38236-0

by Priscilla Turner & illustrated by Whitney Turner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 1996

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Only occasional flashes of cleverness illuminate this parable of warring camps uniting in the face of a common threat. The uneasy truce between the aristocratic vowels and the plebian consonants finally breaks down into open warfare, but at the advent of a giant scribble (oxymoronically described as ``zigs and zags with no form at all''), they join together to ``STOP'' the monster and bid it ``GO AWAY.'' `` `I can't fight that,' whimpered the jumble. `Next they'll make paragraphs . . . pages . . . chapters. . . ' '' Sprouting stick limbs and large hats, the letters, uppercase if adult, lowercase when young, swarm antlike across cleanly drawn backdrops. ``Just think what we can accomplish together,'' enthuses the Supreme Command to the Commander in Chief. ``The poems! The plays! Our memoirs!'' Actually, even careless readers will notice that both sides have been using each other right along in speech, an evidently unintended paradox. Next to books like Eve Merriam's Fighting Words (1992) or Bill Martin and John Archambault's Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (1989), the language play here seems clumsy. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1996

ISBN: 0-374-38236-0

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS

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RUSSELL THE SHEEP

by Rob Scotton & illustrated by Rob Scotton ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2005

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Scotton makes a stylish debut with this tale of a sleepless sheep—depicted as a blocky, pop-eyed, very soft-looking woolly with a skinny striped nightcap of unusual length—trying everything, from stripping down to his spotted shorts to counting all six hundred million billion and ten stars, twice, in an effort to doze off. Not even counting sheep . . . well, actually, that does work, once he counts himself. Dawn finds him tucked beneath a rather-too-small quilt while the rest of his flock rises to bathe, brush and riffle through the Daily Bleat. Russell doesn’t have quite the big personality of Ian Falconer’s Olivia, but more sophisticated fans of the precocious piglet will find in this art the same sort of daffy urbanity. Quite a contrast to the usual run of ovine-driven snoozers, like Phyllis Root’s Ten Sleepy Sheep, illustrated by Susan Gaber (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: April 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-059848-4

Page Count: 40

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS

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by Rob Scotton ; illustrated by Rob Scotton

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by Rob Scotton & illustrated by Rob Scotton

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NOUNS AND VERBS HAVE A FIELD DAY

by Robin Pulver & illustrated by Lynn Rowe Reed ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 2006

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The creators of Punctuation Takes a Vacation (2003) sentence readers to a good time with this follow-up. Feeling left out after the children in Mr. Wright’s class thunder outside for a Field Day, the nouns and verbs left in the classroom decide to organize events of their own. But having chosen like parts of speech for partners—“Glue, Markers and Tape stuck together. Shout wanted to be with Cheer. So did Chew and Eat.”—it quickly becomes apparent that as opposing teams they can’t actually do anything. Depicting the Nouns as objects and the Verbs as hyperactive v-shaped figures, Rowe creates a set of high-energy scenes, climaxing in a Tug of Words and other contests once the participants figure out that they’ll work better mixed rather than matched. This playful introduction to words recalls Ruth Heller’s Kites Sail High (1998) and Merry-Go-Round (1990) for liveliness, and closes with several simple exercises and games to get children into the act. (Picture book. 6-8)