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
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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