This book is best at what it’s trying to do.
An early reader about kids’ best friends.
“My dog is best,” declare a group of aggressively kooky children. One dog is best because “he can jump,” another is best because “she likes hugs,” and other pooches are best because they’re large, small, helpful, or playful. The repetition of “My dog is best” and the slight variations that follow throughout will help newly literate audiences gain confidence and fluency. Given the necessary restraints placed upon the text, the art must do some heavy lifting to keep this approach from falling into Dick-and-Jane dullness, and Catrow succeeds wildly. Many of the children and dogs are appealingly and hilariously caricaturelike, while others are simply sweet, and the wonky background illustrations of toys and other accouterments of childhood will help keep the interest of young ones working their way through the letters. The book wraps up by assuring readers that their dog might, in fact, be the best—a conclusion that will quell any feelings of jealousy or whataboutism (unless the reader in question deeply wants a dog and can’t have one). Children are diverse in terms of skin tones and hair styles.
This book is best at what it’s trying to do. (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780823445073
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
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
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