Geisert adds another link to his inventive, wordless chain-reaction escapades that are awash with cleverness and ingenuity. A family of five pigs is having breakfast in their house that sits cantilevered from a hill. A common mishap of a glass of spilled milk starts things rolling—literally. The milk runs through the table crack, down a drain into a paint tray, which bumps a screwdriver that turns on a buffing wheel that breaks a clothesline and wraps around a table saw, which tips over onto a wagon and turns on. The wagon rolls, the saw cuts the cornerpost of the house, causing it to tip, breaking the kitchen stovepipe that bursts a water pipe that uproots a tree. The momentum and mayhem culminate in a large rock careening downhill and crashing into the roof of the house. Whew! In the final scene, the pig family is standing together, amid the remains of the house, still smiling—somehow. More sophisticated, dark and subtle than Lights Out (2005); fans will delight in the frenetic action and maze of details in the etched illustrations and find relief in the fact that everyone is okay. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-60904-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Walter Lorraine/Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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