An import with higher priority placed on visuals and interactive tweaks than narrative or thematic clarity.
Like the Mumuin.com Fox and Crane (2014), an off-kilter version of the Aesopian fable—brightened up by shiny cartoon scenes positively a-twitch with touch-activated flowers, bugs and other details.
The fox (“sniggering”) decides to play a trick on her “friend” the stork by serving porridge on a flat plate. The stork makes polite excuses and in turn offers lunch at his place. Thinking that she’s been forgiven her “little trick” (“A real gentleman!”), she is flummoxed by hash served in a narrow-necked vase and retreats, “confused and outsmarted,” from his snide invitation to chow down. Her rueful if obscure “I might have known!” serves in place of an explicit moral. The entire tale is told on just five screens, each of which features an outdoorsy scene that slides back and forth with tilts of the tablet and features a tap-happy array of bobbing birds, leaping fish, flowers ready to pop open and figures that gesture or utter sighs. The overlaid text, printed in small type with occasional typos, can be whisked out of sight with an icon tap. Children can choose to listen to the audio narration from speakers or through headphones (the latter option doing double duty as “silent” mode) and to dispense with the monotonous background music.
An import with higher priority placed on visuals and interactive tweaks than narrative or thematic clarity. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)Pub Date: June 23, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: TerryLab
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
The premise is worn gossamer thin, and the joke stopped being funny, if it ever was, long ago.
A fairy tending their garden manages to survive a gaggle of young intruders.
In halting cadences typical of the long-running—and increasingly less amusing—How To Catch… series, the startled mite—never seen face-on in Elkerton’s candy-colored pictures and indeterminate of gender—wonders about the racially diverse interlopers: “Do they know that I can grant wishes? / Or that a new fairy is born when they giggle?” The visual action rather belies the sweetness of the verses, the palette, the bright flowers, and the multicolored resident zebras and unicorns, as after repeated, elaborately designed efforts to trap or even shoot (with a peashooter) the fairy come to naught, the laughing children are escorted out of the garden beneath a rising moon. The encounter ends on a (perhaps unconsciously) ominous note. “Hope they find their way back sometime,” the butterfly-winged narrator concludes. “And just maybe next time they’ll stay!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
The premise is worn gossamer thin, and the joke stopped being funny, if it ever was, long ago. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781728263205
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
