This long-running British series (the first Little Princess book was published in 1986) has been adapted for television there. In this installment, her dad (in a jacket and tie, wearing his crown) has read her a story and is about to turn off the light when the Little Princess shouts, “I WANT MY LIGHT ON!”—with her entire face subsumed into one of those scarlet, tooth-edged mouths. She’s not afraid of the dark but of ghosts. Dad checks under the bed, and General, Admiral, Doctor and Maid assure her there are no ghosts. The Little Princess’s room is a bright yellow, but readers see glimpses of the castle’s arches and stone steps past her doorway—and then there is a little ghost behind her bedpost, with a skeleton toy the shape of Little Princess’s own stuffie. Ghost and Princess scare each other, and he dashes off to his mother, who, as she stirs her pot of frog, worm and spider stew, assures him that there are no such things as little girls.... The pictures are clear, bold and exaggerated to great humorous effect. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7613-6443-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Andersen Press USA
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The kimonos in this title are shown on “creative” (non-traditional) Kokeshi that have evolved from their origins as stickers...
Kokeshi, northern Japanese wooden folk dolls, are painted with differently designed kimonos that denote the area in which they are made and form the inspiration for this pretty novelty.
The kimonos in this title are shown on “creative” (non-traditional) Kokeshi that have evolved from their origins as stickers in France. (Their images are also produced on notecards and journals.) A stilted text, translated from French, accompanies these commercialized, cartoon-like images. The glossy, heavy stock, saturated with a sophisticated palette of black, brown, maroon, bluish-gray and green, teems with kawaii kokeshi— “super cute little wooden dolls”—who talk and act like contemporary little girls. Readers are invited to find the right sash, fan and hair bow to match Kimiyo’s outfit. They locate Yumi’s apartment by lifting the flap that matches her sash. A large gate-fold page reveals Yumi’s family members and another game that involves matching designs to determine her maternal and paternal families. A schoolroom scene shows the days of the week, both in transliteration and in Japanese characters. There are more words to learn when a star (hoshi), a rabbit (usagi) and a pair of socks (tabi), among other objects, serve as inspiration for funny hairstyles that appear when a die-cut page turns.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4521-0493-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
A lightweight fear-dispeller, without the gun violence that now makes Mercer Mayer’s There’s a Nightmare in My Closet (1968)...
Beaten down by a ubiquitous chorus of denials (see title), a monster suffers an existential crisis.
Surrounded by emphatic claims that it doesn’t even exist, a monster sets out not only to prove the contrary, but to establish its scariness credentials too. Alas, neither blasting the world with graffiti and printed fliers nor rearing up menacingly over a baby in a carriage, children at the barre in a ballet class and other supposedly susceptible victims elicits any response. Juggling some cows attracts attention but not the terrified kind. But the monster’s final despairing surrender—“That’s it! It’s over! I give up! ... / Monsters aren’t real (sniff)”—triggers an indignant denial of a different sort from a second, smaller but wilder-looking, creature. It takes the first in hand and leads it off, declaring “We’re two big, strong, scary monsters, and we’ll prove it.” In truth, it won’t escape even very young readers that neither is particularly scary-looking. Indeed, the protagonist-monster is depicted in the sparsely detailed cartoon illustrations as a furry, almost cuddly, bearlike hulk with light-blue spots, antlers and comically googly eyes, certain to provoke more giggles than screams.
A lightweight fear-dispeller, without the gun violence that now makes Mercer Mayer’s There’s a Nightmare in My Closet (1968) so discomfiting. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61067-073-9
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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