Continuing efforts to find a two-legged audience for the woodland tales of Maynard Moose, veteran yarnspinner Claflin follows up The Uglified Ducky (2008) with another “distremely” hilarious mashup. Related in moose dialect, the tale has young Punzel cutting off her “goldie” locks after they become “all full of sticks and twigs and little nastified wudgies of glop” and then tangle hopelessly in the bushes during her flight from a witchy hair stylist. With help from “eight or nine seven dwarfs” with names like Clumsy, Hyper, Grizelda and Ambidexterous, she escapes for a while but eventually falls victim to the witch’s poisoned watermelon. Her glass coffin becomes a tourist-magnet centerpiece for a dwarf-run amusement park until the clumsy Handsome Prince comes riding along on a snow-white moose to fall onto the coffin and wake her. Using dark backdrops that brighten the colors of the blocky figures in the foreground, Stimson places the escapade in a traditional medieval setting. He endows the fugitive damsel with oversized spectacles and slips in droll details like Japanese tourists visiting a “Punzeldog” stand at the roadside attraction. In the end, Punzel falls for the moose, the Prince marries the witch and all “lived happily for never afterwords.” Moral? “[T]here ain’t no moral,” the antlered narrator concludes. Plenty of belly laughs, though. Packaged with a recorded version delivered in a Bullwinkle-ish lisp. (glossary) (Fractured fairy tale. 8-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-87483-914-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: August House
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ordinary kids in an extraordinary setting: still a recipe for bright achievements and belly laughs.
Rejoice! 25 years later, Wayside School is still in session, and the children in Mrs. Jewls’ 30th-floor classroom haven’t changed a bit.
The surreal yet oddly educational nature of their misadventures hasn’t either. There are out-and-out rib ticklers, such as a spelling lesson featuring made-up words and a determined class effort to collect 1 million nail clippings. Additionally, mean queen Kathy steps through a mirror that turns her weirdly nice and she discovers that she likes it, a four-way friendship survives a dumpster dive after lost homework, and Mrs. Jewls makes sure that a long-threatened “Ultimate Test” allows every student to show off a special talent. Episodic though the 30 new chapters are, there are continuing elements that bind them—even to previous outings, such as the note to an elusive teacher Calvin has been carrying since Sideways Stories From Wayside School (1978) and finally delivers. Add to that plenty of deadpan dialogue (“Arithmetic makes my brain numb,” complains Dameon. “That’s why they’re called ‘numb-ers,’ ” explains D.J.) and a wild storm from the titular cloud that shuffles the school’s contents “like a deck of cards,” and Sachar once again dishes up a confection as scrambled and delicious as lunch lady Miss Mush’s improvised “Rainbow Stew.” Diversity is primarily conveyed in the illustrations.
Ordinary kids in an extraordinary setting: still a recipe for bright achievements and belly laughs. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-296538-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Come for the mystery, stay for the backmatter.
This gentle, fast-paced mystery will hook readers with interesting details.
Julieta Leal, 9, is a magnet for disasters. She has a reputation at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where both her parents work, for making trouble. Julieta is just trying to help, and it’s not her fault that sometimes things get broken or she has a hard time following the rules. When Julieta’s dad invites her along on a trip to Paris regarding the loan of some pieces from the Louvre, she jumps at the chance to add another purple pin to her family’s world-travel map. She promises to be helpful and stay out of trouble and desperately wants to shed her reputation of being a liability. This proves difficult when the dazzling Regent Diamond is stolen and Julieta and her dad are implicated in the theft. With her dad’s job in peril and the prized gem missing, Julieta must rely on her keen observations and tenacity to clear their names. Detailed descriptions of Paris landmarks and factual information about museum pieces are woven naturally into the fast-moving plot so that readers come away with knowledge of these topics alongside a satisfying story. Several pages of backmatter notes bolster the learning. The endearing Julieta is bilingual, and she and her family are Mexican American.
Come for the mystery, stay for the backmatter. (glossaries) (Mystery. 8-11)Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64379-046-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tu Books
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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