A hilarious romp featuring a small wild thing with a big, big personality.
“I am deeply, deeply misunderstood,” declares a child who plainly has really saintly parents.
Positive that they are actually a princess, a child sees nothing amiss in scribbling down the stairway wall with a crayon, harnessing their baby brother to pull a royal wagon, and ignoring instructions to clean their room—or, for that matter, wearing a sticky, hollowed-out pineapple top as a crown and inviting a growing swarm of buzzing flies (or “subjects”) to gather. Paired with a humorous declamatory monologue, Hahn’s appealing watercolor scenes follow a small, scowling, light-skinned child with an outsize gift for making fantastic messes, from garbage-strewn bedroom to a kitchen turned utterly topsy-turvy and then, perhaps at the strong, if unmentioned, invitation of an unseen parent, outdoors. Having wielded a fly swatter against some of their more rambunctious “subjects” and sensing rebellion in the ranks, the protagonist at last decides it’s time for an upgrade to a new and, readers will likely agree, more suitable role: warrior queen! (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A hilarious romp featuring a small wild thing with a big, big personality. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-79836-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Gourmets of all things gross will sniff at this.
While Mom’s away, Dad and the kids will play.
Following reminders not to pick their noses or play ball in the house, hardly is Mom out the door before the narrator, his sister, and Dad pull out industrial quantities of green goo, shape it into a massive ball, break a vase (“ ‘She’ll kill us,’ Dad shrieked”) and—uh oh, there it goes out the window. “ ‘It’s heading to town,’ I yelled. ‘Quick, get your bikes.’ / But our slippery snot-rocket was leaving our sight.” Having picked up pets, underwear, and miscellaneous litter on its way, the giga-greenie reaches town, where Mom (of course) is waiting to swat it into outer space with a big stick. She gets a Booger Blaster medal, and all is forgiven. Young audiences might forgive Richtel’s cavalier attitude toward rhyme and regular metrics, but after a promisingly icky prefatory table of booger types, Wildish turns in a lackluster loogie that looks more like papier-mâché or a boulder-sized, oddly colored meatball than anything truly worth gagging at. And do readers really need yet another doofus dad? A “postman” and two other figures are brown-skinned in an otherwise all-white cast.
Gourmets of all things gross will sniff at this. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-234984-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
A tribute to the essential substance, washed free of preachiness or even faintly cautionary messages.
Twelve children from different areas of the world offer lyrical reflections on what water means to them.
To Delaunois’ fictive cast water invariably sparks positive feelings—even for a Catalan lad watching his village being flooded by a dam “for the sake of new power, / the reservoir that holds the energy to light up distant cities. / For me,” he concludes, “water is the night that blazes like day.” It is valued in places where it is a scarce resource too: to a Moroccan desert child water is “a cup of mint tea,” and it’s “an outstretched hand” from a tank truck for a child in drought-stricken Mauretania. Though the specific locale of each young speaker is keyed only by a watermarked version of “Water is life” embedded in the illustration that is translated into his or her script and language (identified in a list at the end), Frischeteau varies the skin color and, albeit in an idealized way, facial features of his human figures. He also often adds characteristic wildlife, national dress, or other cues to each locale. Following an unborn child’s “For me, water is the song of my mother: / the ocean of her belly where I am transforming myself,” the author concludes that “for all of us, water is a matter of life.”
A tribute to the essential substance, washed free of preachiness or even faintly cautionary messages. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77278-015-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Pajama Press
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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