Ah-choo! The three little dragons are sick and the Good Knight (Good Night, Good Knight, 1999) once again comes to the rescue. While riding through the forest, keeping watch over everything and everyone, the Good Knight hears a sneeze. He finds his dragon friends in their cave, hot with fever, noses running, and teeth “chat-chat-chattering.” He visits the old wizard for a concoction that will cure the sick dragons. These little dragons are sick, but they are not sick enough to scarf down a nasty soup made of fish scales, old snails, fingernails, and lizard tails. Undaunted, our hero turns repeatedly to the wizard, who comes up with revolting concoctions that the sick but discerning dragons repeatedly reject. Finally, our Good Knight turns to the person he should have turned to in the first place—his mother. She throws in a little of this and a little of that and comes up with something that makes them slurp the soup until every drop is gone. Plecas’s endearing, whimsical illustrations record every detail, from the hero’s greenish cheeks and pale extended tongue spitting out some slimy concoction to the exhausted droopy dragon eyelids. Repeated phrases and familiar, amusing situations are the recipe for a tale that will not lose its flavor when read over and over. Emerging readers will read this one again and again, every delicious word. Long live the Good Knight! (Easy reader. 4-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-46914-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
Hazel Nutt returns for another adventure. This time, she’s an alien hunter zooming through the cosmos in her spaceship, BoobyPrize. Caught in a “meateor” shower (meatballs, you understand), she makes an emergency landing on the planet Wutt. Following an Abbott-and-Costello exchange as she tries to uncover the name of the planet, Hazel discovers she has landed on the Wutties’s leader. She feels awful and makes amends by giving them her ladder before blasting off—unknowingly freeing their little lady leader. Elliott’s story is nonsensical goofiness. No explanations are given for the meatball meteors or Hazel’s “alien hunter” status, and there’s no reason given why the ladder has a palliative effect on the Wutties. Everything exists for visual and verbal puns. Kelley’s wiggly watercolors are a good match and the main strength here. Readers with sophisticated enough senses of humor might enjoy hunting for the visual puns. Not for everyone, but fans of the first will likely be pleased. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8234-1843-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
This import from Down Under pairs baroque illustrations to a heartwarming tale featuring a bumbling magician who doesn’t realize that his on-stage accidents bring “far more happiness to the world than any ordinary card trick ever could,” until he hires, then falls in love with, Betty, a shy and equally inept assistant. Looking like images in funhouse mirrors, Montefiasco and the other figures in Redlich’s scenes are almost lost amid an extravagant clutter of magic tricks, old posters and newspapers, toys, feathers, memorabilia, visual references to great magicians of the past, and general bric-a-brac—some of it, in homage to Thompson’s own famously busy art, filling up nooks and crannies beneath the floorboards. Pleasant tale, but the pictures are the real draw. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59572-008-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Star Bright
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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