Feisty, funny Nanny Piggins and her adoring charges will charm readers and listeners stateside, who'll be overjoyed there...
If Amelia Bedelia and Mary Poppins raised a piglet, Nanny Piggins...could surely beat that pig in a cake-eating contest.
Australia's favorite porcine childcare worker returns in a new collection of adventures sure to entertain and possibly inspire envy in readers who'll wish she were their nanny. In the first tale, Nanny Piggins, former circus performer and abject worshipper of cake, and her charges, the three Green children (not to mention Nanny's brother, the dancing bear Boris), thwart the wicked plan of Mr. Green, penny-pinching tax attorney and father of the kids, to find a wife who'll do Nanny's job for free. Nanny does jury duty, and the jurors fall so deeply in love with her baking they conspire to lengthen the trial by never agreeing. She turns a game of pirates into a tunnel to China (to sample authentic Chinese food) only to end up breaking into a men's prison...even that doesn't end where one would expect. She fends off egotistical armadillos, gypsy queens and Buzzy Bee cookie salesgirls while making sure the children don't spend too much time in school. Santat's energetic, expressive and silly line drawings are the delectable icing on this confection.
Feisty, funny Nanny Piggins and her adoring charges will charm readers and listeners stateside, who'll be overjoyed there are five additional volumes already out Down Under. (Humor. 7-10)Pub Date: July 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-19923-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dizzyingly silly.
The famous superhero returns to fight another villain with all the trademark wit and humor the series is known for.
Despite the title, Captain Underpants is bizarrely absent from most of this adventure. His school-age companions, George and Harold, maintain most of the spotlight. The creative chums fool around with time travel and several wacky inventions before coming upon the evil Turbo Toilet 2000, making its return for vengeance after sitting out a few of the previous books. When the good Captain shows up to save the day, he brings with him dynamic action and wordplay that meet the series’ standards. The Captain Underpants saga maintains its charm even into this, the 11th volume. The epic is filled to the brim with sight gags, toilet humor, flip-o-ramas and anarchic glee. Holding all this nonsense together is the author’s good-natured sense of harmless fun. The humor is never gross or over-the-top, just loud and innocuous. Adults may roll their eyes here and there, but youngsters will eat this up just as quickly as they devoured every other Underpants episode.
Dizzyingly silly. (Humor. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-50490-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
A feel-good tale of a clever and determined stallion set against a well-developed landscape.
In mid-19th-century Nevada, a colt named Sky grows up to lead his band of wild horses.
Parry’s moving story follows the pattern of her recent animal tales, A Wolf Called Wander (2019) and A Whale of the Wild (2020), chronicling a wild animal’s life in the first person, imagining its point of view, and detailing and appreciating the natural world it inhabits. As Sky grows from wobbly newborn to leader of his family, he faces more than the usual challenges for colts who must fight their stallions or leave their herds when they are grown up. Fagan’s appealing black-and-white illustrations help readers envision this survival story. Sky’s adventures include forced service with the Pony Express; being befriended by an enslaved Paiute boy; escaping to find his now-captured band; and helping them escape the silver miners who’d destroyed their world. Animal lovers will applaud his ingenuity and stubbornness. Although Sky’s band has suffered serious injuries (his mother is blind), he and Storm, a mare who was his childhood companion, lead them toward safety in a new wilderness. The writer’s admiration for these wild horses and her concerns about human destruction of their environment come through even more clearly in a series of concluding expository essays discussing the wild horses, the Indigenous Americans, the natural history of the Great Basin, silver mining, and the Pony Express.
A feel-good tale of a clever and determined stallion set against a well-developed landscape. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780062995957
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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