by Roxie Munro & illustrated by Roxie Munro ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009
Munro moves from architecture to paleontology for her latest Inside-Outside album, portraying each of eight familiar dinosaurs as a fossil skeleton and then, on the next spread, fleshing the specimen out and posing it in an open, natural setting with several other creatures of the same era. Though she takes a conservative course in using pale colors and only occasionally depicting skin with stripes or other patterns, young dinophiles will relish the cleanly drawn details and (on the alternate spreads) non-gory, easy-to-follow predator-prey chases in the backgrounds. Except for name labels (and their transliterations into English) there is no text until the closing visual keys, which are linked to a few sentences of basic information about each dinosaur plus identifications of other animals visible in each scene. Pre-readers in particular will be drawn to this prehistoric primer. (bibliography, web resources) (Informational picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5624-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
Share your opinion of this book
More by Roxie Munro
BOOK REVIEW
by Roxie Munro ; illustrated by Roxie Munro
BOOK REVIEW
by Roxie Munro ; illustrated by Roxie Munro
BOOK REVIEW
by Roxie Munro ; illustrated by Roxie Munro
by Linda Bailey ; illustrated by Colin Jack ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2014
Well-trodden dino turf, but the grass is still fairly green.
A tongue-in-cheek look at some of the many ways that idle household dinosaurs can be put to work.
Jack casts a host of cartoon dinosaurs—most of them humongous, nearly all smiling and candy bright of hue—in roles as can openers, potato mashers, yard sweepers, umbrellas on rainy days, snowplows, garbage collectors, and like helpers or labor savers. Even babysitters, though, as Bailey aptly notes, “not all dinosaurs are suited to this work.” Still, “[t]he possibilities are amazing!” And even if there aren’t any handy dinos around, she concludes, any live-in octopus, sasquatch, kangaroo or other creature can be likewise exploited. A bespectacled, woolly-haired boy who looks rather a lot like Weird Al Yankovic serves as dino-wrangler in chief, heading up a multiethnic cast of kids who enjoy the dinosaurs’ services. As with all books of this ilk, the humor depends on subtextual visual irony. A group of kids happily flying pterosaur kites sets up a gag featuring a little boy holding a limp string tied to the tail of a grumpy-looking stegosaurus. Changes on this premise have been run over and over since Bernard Most’s If the Dinosaurs Came Back (1978), and though this iteration doesn’t have any fresh twists to offer, at least it’s bright and breezy enough to ward off staleness.
Well-trodden dino turf, but the grass is still fairly green. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-77049-568-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
More by Linda Bailey
BOOK REVIEW
by Linda Bailey ; illustrated by Natalia Shaloshvili
BOOK REVIEW
by Linda Bailey ; illustrated by Freya Hartas
BOOK REVIEW
by Linda Bailey ; illustrated by Isabelle Follath
by Mercer Mayer & illustrated by Mercer Mayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2011
Eye candy for dinosaur fans, with piles of yard-sale goods and other junk on hand that will reward closer looks.
The plot doesn’t exactly make sense, but that hardly matters when the pictures show a suburban neighborhood suddenly overrun with humongous dinosaurs.
His mother’s steadfast refusal to let him get a dog only breaks down after a lad visits a yard sale to buy first a huge egg that hatches into a rambunctious baby triceratops and then a “dinosaur horn” that brings a towering T. Rex and more dinos thundering out of the trees. In some of his most finished, sharply detailed illustrations ever, Mayer shows casually dressed human figures and massive, exuberant prehistoric ones—all bearing comically exaggerated expressions—chasing one another through yards and down streets until the lad blows his horn again and the surprised-looking dinos fade away. Cut to a final scene in the pet shop, where boy and wriggly puppy bond as Mom takes her abrupt about face with good grace. The first-person narration runs to just a line or so per page, but it might as well not be there at all, so expressive are the illustrations.
Eye candy for dinosaur fans, with piles of yard-sale goods and other junk on hand that will reward closer looks. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2316-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Share your opinion of this book
More by Mercer Mayer
BOOK REVIEW
by Mercer Mayer & illustrated by Mercer Mayer & developed by Silver Dolphin Books
BOOK REVIEW
by Mercer Mayer & illustrated by Mercer Mayer & developed by Oceanhouse Media
BOOK REVIEW
by Mercer Mayer illustrated by Mercer Mayer & developed by Sterling Publishing
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.