A handsome and engaging adaptation that works equally well as a stand-alone and a teaser.
A farm boy befriends a huge robot after orchestrating its capture in this abridged, newly illustrated edition of Hughes’ classic tale.
Grey does take a few liberties: She kits out the armored behemoth with mechanical body parts but gives him an organically mobile mouth, and in one scene the titular character leaves footprints that are much larger than their accompanying description (“the size of a single bed”) suggests. Still, the images she pairs with this shortened version of the original’s first three chapters do justice to the inscrutable, glowing-eyed giant’s menacing bulk as he comes from nowhere to plunge down a cliff, reassembles himself one piece at a time, and then goes about chowing down on tractors and wire fences until clever but much smaller Hogarth lures him into a deep hole. By the time the giant has dug his way out, the empathetic lad has a better idea and leads the metal-eating monster to a tasty junkyard where the two, in a cozy wordless finale, share smiles and a storybook. The rest of the tale is well worth seeking out; in any case, the recent release of a popular film based on Peter Brown’s Wild Robot trilogy has led to both a picture-book spinoff and an uptick in interest in free-ranging robots, so this self-contained segment is well timed to catch the wave. Hogarth has light tan skin; other characters are diverse in complexion.
A handsome and engaging adaptation that works equally well as a stand-alone and a teaser. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780571397617
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A close encounter of the best kind.
Left behind when the space bus departs, a child discovers that the moon isn’t as lifeless as it looks.
While the rest of the space-suited class follows the teacher like ducklings, one laggard carrying crayons and a sketchbook sits down to draw our home planet floating overhead, falls asleep, and wakes to see the bus zooming off. The bright yellow bus, the gaggle of playful field-trippers, and even the dull gray boulders strewn over the equally dull gray lunar surface have a rounded solidity suggestive of Plasticine models in Hare’s wordless but cinematic scenes…as do the rubbery, one-eyed, dull gray creatures (think: those stress-busting dolls with ears that pop out when squeezed) that emerge from the regolith. The mutual shock lasts but a moment before the lunarians eagerly grab the proffered crayons to brighten the bland gray setting with silly designs. The creatures dive into the dust when the bus swoops back down but pop up to exchange goodbye waves with the errant child, who turns out to be an olive-skinned kid with a mop of brown hair last seen drawing one of their new friends with the one crayon—gray, of course—left in the box. Body language is expressive enough in this debut outing to make a verbal narrative superfluous.
A close encounter of the best kind. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) upgrades to The Mice and the Rolls-Royce.
In Windsor Castle there sits a “dollhouse like no other,” replete with working plumbing, electricity, and even a full library of real, tiny books. Called Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, it also plays host to the Whiskers family, a clan of mice that has maintained the house for generations. Henry Whiskers and his cousin Jeremy get up to the usual high jinks young mice get up to, but when Henry’s little sister Isabel goes missing at the same time that the humans decide to clean the house up, the usually bookish big brother goes on the adventure of his life. Now Henry is driving cars, avoiding cats, escaping rats, and all before the upcoming mouse Masquerade. Like an extended version of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), Priebe keeps this short chapter book constantly moving, with Duncan’s peppy art a cute capper. Oddly, the dollhouse itself plays only the smallest of roles in this story, and no factual information on the real Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is included at the tale’s end (an opportunity lost).
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales. (Fantasy. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6575-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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