Leaves readers teetering between delight and bafflement.
Lonely Bird makes a friend, loses him, rescues him, and finds him a new home.
Visually, Whiting’s picture-book debut is a charmer. Crafted from white paper, Lonely Bird is shaped like a bean, with just dots for eyes, a tiny triangle beak, and stick legs. She is placed amid cozy domestic scenes lushly realized in oils; she’s small, about the height of the spool of thread she keeps in her back-of-the-bookcase home. Her new friend, a scrap of paper ripped from a spiral-bound notebook (the ruffles are its many feet), is sweetly doglike, and when he’s sucked into the vacuum cleaner with a “swglooooooosh,” readers will be as distressed as Lonely Bird. Moments in the plot are likewise engaging, especially Lonely Bird’s long trek across the kitchen floor to the “monster’s lair,” where the vacuum cleaner slumbers, her descent into the very belly of that beast to retrieve her friend, and, finally, her decision to find her pal a new home: a sheet of paper with a drawing of a tree. But however cunning individual scenes may be, the story doesn’t hang together and will leave young listeners with questions. Why does Lonely Bird separate herself from her friend so easily? Is she really not very lonely after all? Why is that her name, then? And most puzzling of all: What is her relationship with the electrical outlet in the kitchen? The human family that inhabits Lonely Bird’s house presents white. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Leaves readers teetering between delight and bafflement. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781536226188
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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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