Blake’s take on the stages of childhood is entertainingly offbeat but right on target. George and Bella spend many happy days making model airplanes, dusting, and eating ice cream, but it’s no surprise that their baby, Zagazoo, is delivered in a lumpy postal parcel. George and Bella add another activity to their happy days—“throwing [Zagazoo] from one to the other.” One morning, the pretty little baby has become a large baby vulture with terrifying screeches, highly vocal at night. At their wit’s end, they get a reprieve when the vulture turns into a small, unwittingly destructive elephant, but the transformations are not over. Zagazoo is next a mud-loving warthog, a fire-breathing dragon, and so on, until one day he is a young man with perfect manners and a liking for the young Mirabelle. They are united, but George and Bella have transformed into a pair of feather-dropping, eyeglass-wearing, saggy-chinned brown pelicans. The great arc of life, according to Blake, is happiness to horrors to happiness, with a great dose of the unknown to keep everyone guessing. This book is hilarious, and parents and children will be nodding in recognition as Zagazoo grows up and as his parents grow—happier. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30178-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
From Johnston (An Old Shell, 1999, etc.), poetic phrases that follow a ghostly barn owl through days and nights, suns and moons. Barn owls have been nesting and roosting, hunting and hatching in the barn and its surroundings for as long as the barn has housed spiders, as long as the wheat fields have housed mice, “a hundred years at least.” The repetition of alliterative words and the hushed hues of the watercolors evoke the soundless, timeless realm of the night owl through a series of spectral scenes. Short, staccato strings of verbs describe the age-old actions and cycles of barn owls, who forever “grow up/and sleep/and wake/and blink/and hunt for mice.” Honey-colored, diffused light glows in contrast to the star-filled night scenes of barn owls blinking awake. A glimpse into the hidden campestral world of the elusive barn owl. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-981-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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