There are several other successful picture books about collective nouns to be preferred over this one.
Collective nouns are the singular focus of this straightforward picture book.
A round-headed monkey asks a white man who has a positively insectile mustache and is dressed in a top hat and red coat, “I’m curious. What do you call a group of geese?” The man answers the question (a gaggle) and adds the names of groups of sheep (a flock) and cows (a herd). The monkey replies, “Wow! I wonder what you would call a group of giraffes?” And so the dialogue continues: the monkey asking, the man answering. These two characters are pictured against a white background on a side panel set off from each spread illustrating the group of animals in a way that alludes to their collective noun, with varying success—a memory of elephants, for example, is shown as an elephant within another elephant’s thought bubble within a third elephant’s thought bubble. There is no apparent reason why the monkey wants to know these nouns nor any apparent structure moving the story forward. Reading this book aloud is no fun, unless learning the collective nouns is of burning interest to readers, and there is no index that would make this book useful in a reference collection. The only reason to keep turning the pages is the lovely collage illustrations, featuring playful use of shapes and patterns in sophisticated color palettes.
There are several other successful picture books about collective nouns to be preferred over this one. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-264457-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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