Reminiscent of early Sesame Street titles for its mediocre writing and fuzzy, low quality illustrations, this house tour will not only be meaningless to readers unfamiliar with the Wallace and Gromit feature film and shorts, it’ll leave even confirmed fans struggling to make out what’s going on. Chatty commentary fills dialogue balloons as the bumbling window washer/inventor and his silent, thunderous-browed canine partner squire viewers from room to room, making oblique references to events in the films, extolling various nonworking Rube Goldberg-style inventions like the Bully Proof Vest and the Turbo Diner while trying to serve tea and (of course) cheese. Meanwhile, squads of mice contrive to nab every bit of the latter. The pictures, which are drawn rather than composed with the engaging claymation figures of the films, have a flat, scribbly look, and several times feature abrupt changes of scene or dissolves that cut across the middle—techniques that work on the screen but are visually confusing on the page. Stick with the DVDs. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: May 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-7434-6783-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Pocket UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
Having put together a band with renowned cousin Duck Ellington and singer “Bee” Holiday, Rooster’s chances sure look...
Winning actually isn’t everything, as jazz-happy Rooster learns when he goes up against the legendary likes of Mules Davis and Ella Finchgerald at the barnyard talent show.
Having put together a band with renowned cousin Duck Ellington and singer “Bee” Holiday, Rooster’s chances sure look good—particularly after his “ ‘Hen from Ipanema’ [makes] / the barnyard chickies swoon.”—but in the end the competition is just too stiff. No matter: A compliment from cool Mules and the conviction that he still has the world’s best band soon puts the strut back in his stride. Alexander’s versifying isn’t always in tune (“So, he went to see his cousin, / a pianist of great fame…”), and despite his moniker Rooster plays an electric bass in Bower’s canted country scenes. Children are unlikely to get most of the jokes liberally sprinkled through the text, of course, so the adults sharing it with them should be ready to consult the backmatter, which consists of closing notes on jazz’s instruments, history and best-known musicians.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58536-688-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Strong rhythms and occasional full or partial rhymes give this account of P.T. Barnum’s 1884 elephant parade across the newly opened Brooklyn Bridge an incantatory tone. Catching a whiff of public concern about the new bridge’s sturdiness, Barnum seizes the moment: “’I will stage an event / that will calm every fear, erase every worry, / about that remarkable bridge. / My display will amuse, inform / and astound some. / Or else my name isn’t Barnum!’” Using a rich palette of glowing golds and browns, Roca imbues the pachyderms with a calm solidity, sending them ambling past equally solid-looking buildings and over a truly monumental bridge—which soars over a striped Big Top tent in the final scene. A stately rendition of the episode, less exuberant, but also less fictionalized, than Phil Bildner’s Twenty-One Elephants (2004), illustrated by LeUyen Pham. (author’s note, resource list) (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-44887-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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