The multilayered illustrations cleverly capture a child imaginatively transforming herself, but it’s impossible to read this...
An artistically inventive tale, rendered clunky and frustrating by interactive features of, at best, amateur quality.
Following an introductory frame story, Evangelina, a young artist who spins nighttime tales for her toys, describes how she and her mother pay a visit to a real zoo after old boots and other clothing inspires her to fancy herself as various animals. The zoo animals are photographed; the imagined ones are childlike drawings superimposed over more finished paintings of Evangelina’s face or other images. Selected screens have single, simple touch-activated changes of color or figure position, primitively signaled by printed instructions in the margin that locate the one area that will respond to a tap. Like a paper flip book, these changes are accomplished with short sequences of nearly identical separate images which, though they shift invisibly the first time through, must be manually scrolled back one screen at a time to replay the effect or, for that matter, even to page ahead. The story downloads into iBooks, and tapping any figure that is not touch-sensitive invariably activates the reader’s menu bar, highlighting and search functions—all of which, except for the “index” icon, are irrelevant distractions.
The multilayered illustrations cleverly capture a child imaginatively transforming herself, but it’s impossible to read this through without annoying stops and interruptions, and readers accustomed to the flexibility and razzmatazz of the better apps will be disappointed. (iPad enhanced e-book. 6-8)Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Jellywalk
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound.
The titular cookie runs off the page at a bookstore storytime, pursued by young listeners and literary characters.
Following on 13 previous How To Catch… escapades, Wallace supplies sometimes-tortured doggerel and Elkerton, a set of helter-skelter cartoon scenes. Here the insouciant narrator scampers through aisles, avoiding a series of elaborate snares set by the racially diverse young storytime audience with help from some classic figures: “Alice and her mad-hat friends, / as a gift for my unbirthday, / helped guide me through the walls of shelves— / now I’m bound to find my way.” The literary helpers don’t look like their conventional or Disney counterparts in the illustrations, but all are clearly identified by at least a broad hint or visual cue, like the unnamed “wizard” who swoops in on a broom to knock over a tower labeled “Frogwarts.” Along with playing a bit fast and loose with details (“Perhaps the boy with the magic beans / saved me with his cow…”) the author discards his original’s lip-smacking climax to have the errant snack circling back at last to his book for a comfier sort of happily-ever-after.
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7282-0935-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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