Not garbage—but not exactly cordon bleu, either
An abandoned street dog with a compassionate streak beats the odds.
Showing little apparent interest in either laying out a logically constructed storyline or keeping to a consistent metrical framework, Wilkinson relates in verse the title character’s adventures. This stray always has a few crumbs to share with the resident mice, but he is ejected from his alley by a larger dog and a cat. During his flight he does several good deeds for other creatures before he is rescued by loving hands (“He is put in a cage and feels a bit scared, / But the woman is kind and speaks like she cares”). This occurs just before an abrupt ending that dissolves into incoherence: “Each Sunday at noon as food’s being grilled / Baked or boiled and all bellies filled, / Smells float from the kitchen and into his nose / His family call out, ‘It’s dinner time soon!’ ” Kalorkoti populates her modernist urban scenes with unlikely (or, perhaps, not) numbers of sinuously drawn dogs, cats, rats, mice, and even foxes amid noxious-looking puddles and scattered litter. Though she neglects to tackle a few challenges, such as showing exactly how the kindly canine carries a mouse trapped in a milk bottle in the middle of a busy street to safety, she does load the skinny, black, flop-eared terrier up with visual appeal…and leaves him at the close lovingly opening the kitchen door to admit a horde of four-legged friends and erstwhile foes. With a lot of work this could be read as a broad “cast your bread upon the waters” sort of allegory, but more effective, and more tightly woven, appeals to sentiment about the plight of abandoned animals abound, such as Marc Simont’s The Stray Dog (2001) or Tony Johnston and Jonathan Nelson’s tender Hey Dog (2019).
Not garbage—but not exactly cordon bleu, either . (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-3-89955-832-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Little Gestalten
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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