The first week of September means the annual back-to-school shopping spree for school supplies, and even not-quite-civilized aardvarks need new backpacks, notebooks, and markers (both the fat kind and the skinny kind, as every parent of a first-grader knows). The author and illustrator (The Awful Aardvarks Go to School,1997) team up for this second accounting of amusing aardvark antics, with Lindbergh’s clever rhyming couplets and a continuing device of the shopping list repeating on the border of each two-page spread. The quartet of Awful Aardvarks romps through the Shop-All-Day Mall as items are crossed off their list, causing mischief in one shop after another and headaches for the animal shopkeepers. Pearson’s loose watercolors are a busy delight, with expressive faces on the horrified store clerks and fellow shoppers and lots of little details to discover in multiple readings. Just after exiting a candy store with sticky hands and faces, the aardvarks cause particular trouble for the bowtied bear shopkeepers in the Bears and Bubbles Bookstore. “All the shoppers stopped shopping and gave them weird looks. The Aardvarks were stuck—they were stuck to the books!” (Don't miss the display of award-winning “Called-a-Cat Books.”) No money changes hands for all the aardvark purchases, and no shopping bags (or momma aardvark) are seen to hold all the new supplies, but who needs a realistic view of the modern mall when you can have roly-poly aardvarks racing on Rollerblades or trying on feather boas? A rollicking romp of a picture book that will make an excellent first-day-of-school story for primary-grade kids. (Picture book. 4-7)
Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88763-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The can’t-miss subject of this Step into Reading series entry—a unicorn with a magic horn who also longs for wings—trumps its text, which is dry even by easy-reader standards. A boy unicorn, whose horn has healing powers, reveals his wish to a butterfly in a castle garden, a bluebird in the forest and a snowy white swan in a pond. Falling asleep at the edge of the sea, the unicorn is visited by a winged white mare. He heals her broken wing and she flies away. After sadly invoking his wish once more, he sees his reflection: “He had big white wings!” He flies off after the mare, because he “wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ ” Perfectly suiting this confection, Silin-Palmer’s pictures teem with the mass market–fueled iconography of what little girls are (ostensibly) made of: rainbows, flowers, twinkly stars and, of course, manes down to there. (Easy reader. 4-7)
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-83117-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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