Should have readers and caregivers singing, clapping, and bouncing along.
This picture book plays on the universal temptation to push buttons.
A squirrel—presumably the first-person narrator of the book—finds a large, round, red button and wonders what would happen when it’s pressed. The squirrel presses the button, and a large rubber horn pops up and honks: “Beep!” The sound attracts a bird and a dog, and together the three come across a triangular orange button. “What does the orange button do?” they wonder, and they discover that it causes them all to clap. As the picture book progresses, other animals—including an elephant, a tortoise, a deer, and a small dinosaur—join the trio, and together they come across and press a giant hexagonal blue button, a round green button, a yellow button (literally—it looks as though it’s come off a coat), a square pink button, and a small purple button that can only be reached by climbing a ladder. Each of the buttons makes the friends do something different, from singing and bouncing to blowing raspberries. British writer Nicholls’ simple, silly narrative and Woollvin’s colorfully childlike illustrations result in a fun picture book that incorporates shapes and colors and that can be used at home and in libraries and classrooms. Pages are dominated by gray with accents—including the animals’ fur and feathers—changing to match the color of each button.
Should have readers and caregivers singing, clapping, and bouncing along. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-6715-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Engaging, rewarding, and utterly delightful.
Readers count from one to 10 and then jump from there to 15, 20, and 25 in this picture book featuring creatures in the wild.
Animals and their babies take the stage in this paper-engineered tale that allows young readers to make surprise discoveries. On the first spread, they meet a bat. Lift up the precisely die-cut bat’s wing to see “1 baby / Holding on tight as they fly through the night.” Page turns are propelled by the query that concludes each and every spread: “Who has more babies than that?” Continuing to count upward, readers meet leopard cubs, owlets, fox kits, leverets, caterpillars, and many more animals. Creatively designed flaps and die cuts, as well as pages with nontraditional trims, invite young hands to lift, peek, and search: Lift leaf-shaped flaps to see “8 baby mice”; peek through tree-trunk–shaped die cuts to see a forest with “15 poults”; and turn pages shaped like verdant hills to see “2 lambs.” The rhymes are unfussy, pleasingly rhythmic, and have unfailingly flawless meter (“9 ducklings / Swimming and snacking, / Practicing quacking”). Richly colored illustrations in vivid crimson, sapphire, marble green, and copper hues feature realistic animals in their natural habitats, though most are given sleek, wide, stylized eyes. The final spread throws readers a curveball with “LOTS of spiderlings,” depicted as die-cut holes with eight legs each on the previous page—and, it turns out, many of the pages before that.
Engaging, rewarding, and utterly delightful. (Picture book/novelty. 3-6)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-32453-0
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Get ready for wordplay that’s giggly and fun and lasts long after the story is…over, alas.
Cheerful endpaper illustrations of rhyming word pairs set the stage for this hilarious jab at the nursery-rhyme format.
One day, Chester wakes up and discovers he has lost his special talent—he can no longer rhyme! The text quips that “it baffled poor Chester. He felt almost queasy. / To match up two sounds, it was always so . . . / . . . simple for him.” A disheartened Chester walks to school through a neighborhood populated by classic European nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale characters—there’s a troll under a bridge, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker, and more. At school, Chester’s classmates try to help him get his rhyming groove back by staging a show and tell with a cat, bat, mat, hat, and even a rat. Poor Chester can only come up with amusing placeholder names—a bat is a “swingy sports stick,” a mat is a “muddy foot wipe,” and so on. On his way home, he observes community members performing various jobs and has a revelation that puts things in perspective. Monsen’s clever text offers both lexical fun and an important lesson: “This too shall pass.” Well-timed page turns will have kids shouting out the missing, but easily guessable, end rhymes. Sharp-eyed observers will also notice that the shops in the artwork have rhyming names. Hanlon’s busy gouache and colored pencil illustrations are full of attention-grabbing slapstick humor. Chester reads as White; secondary characters have a range of skin tones. (The review was updated for accuracy.)
Get ready for wordplay that’s giggly and fun and lasts long after the story is…over, alas. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: March 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5482-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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