A low-key, appealingly unpretentious twist on a familiar folk tale.
A revised “Little Red Riding Hood,” with unusually simple and effective illustrations and interactive features.
Fong suspends small figures drawn in thin, scribbly lines against speckled sepia backgrounds free of extraneous detail, creating narrative movement for her retelling with one or two discreet spiral buttons in each scene. These activate a gesture, cause a line of text to appear or some similarly simple change when tapped. She also transforms the original tale’s cautionary message. She follows the traditional plotline until Red Riding Hood enters Grandma’s house, but then she puts the wolf in front of the stove in the kitchen, where he indignantly denies any wrongdoing and hands Red the basket of goodies she had left in the woods. In comes Grandma to make the lesson explicit (“What did I tell you about judging people by their appearances?”) and to join child and wolf at the table for “a nice dinner of porkchops.” Consonant with the overall sparseness of art and prose, page advances are manual only, and there are neither looped animations nor audio tracks.
A low-key, appealingly unpretentious twist on a familiar folk tale. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Debbie Fong
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
Give this child’s-eye view of a day at the beach with an attentive father high marks for coziness: “When your ball blows across the sand and into the ocean and starts to drift away, your daddy could say, Didn’t I tell you not to play too close to the waves? But he doesn’t. He wades out into the cold water. And he brings your ball back to the beach and plays roll and catch with you.” Alley depicts a moppet and her relaxed-looking dad (to all appearances a single parent) in informally drawn beach and domestic settings: playing together, snuggling up on the sofa and finally hugging each other goodnight. The third-person voice is a bit distancing, but it makes the togetherness less treacly, and Dad’s mix of love and competence is less insulting, to parents and children both, than Douglas Wood’s What Dads Can’t Do (2000), illus by Doug Cushman. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-00361-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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
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