An upbeat story with a moral about believing in yourself accompanied by fantastic illustrations—but told in stilted verse.
Get ready to race! Jungle animals, led by three delightfully illustrated animal children, are racing for the joy of it in this rhyming children’s book debut by Rogers (Out of His Mouth!, 2012).
Timmy the tiger, Joshua the jaguar, and Jessica the giraffe decide to plan a junglewide race, inviting all the jungle creatures to compete. Climbing up Jessica’s tall neck, the boys look for likely competitors. After recruiting an elephant, lion, rhino, and gorilla, the children are surprised when a snake decides to join the race. Snake talks a big game and succeeds in intimidating all the other competitors: “He caused such a stir / For those who were entered / That fear was now focused / As fear would be centered.” But Joshua and Timmy are unimpressed by the snake’s boasts and refuse to be intimidated. When the snake takes off at the start, his tail in his mouth and rolling like a wheel, the boys treat his technique like a game, catching up and jumping through the snake’s hoop before passing him. The lesson Rogers presents—having positive thoughts and not letting a bully scare you away from doing your best—might be stronger if Joshua or Timmy had treated the snake like a threat, but their cheerful expressions in McCoy’s exuberant illustrations make their fearlessness seem merely like an admirable character trait. Rogers’ rhymes are uneven, varying in patterns throughout, including AAAA, ABAB, ABCB, and AABB. The verses sometimes meander, especially when describing the snake: “This master’s illusion / Had all of them worried / He played with their minds / And he never was hurried.” Jessica’s disappearance from most of the story (she does not win the race, though she is pictured as a competitor, and she never shows a reaction to the snake) may strike young readers—particularly girls—as odd. The illustrations, however, with the human-seeming animals, will definitely grab the attention of young readers and may strengthen the strained verses.
An upbeat story with a moral about believing in yourself accompanied by fantastic illustrations—but told in stilted verse.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490432526
Page Count: 82
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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