Playing it (more or less) straight in the text but not in the pictures, Briant chronicles a young insomniac’s efforts to get to sleep, stymied by noises all around, from bumps and shrieks in adjoining apartments, to voices in the hallway and commotions down in the street. The ruckus is created by a set of unusual but familiar fellow residents, from a giant searching for his goose and three irritated bears catching an interloper in one of their beds, to a lovely party-goer losing a slipper as she runs down the front steps and a raggedly dressed wolf trying to entice a trio of piglets to come out and play. Briant creates a simply drawn setting and a multiethnic (not to mention multi-species) cast for this nighttime urban symphony—from which the wakeful narrator finally finds surcease by pulling a pea out from beneath her mattress: “Then I turned over once, turned over twice. And fell fast asleep.” A restful alternative to the likes of Jerome & Jarrett Pumphrey’s Creepy Things Are Scaring Me (2003), illus by Rosanne Litzinger. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59643-056-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip. The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface. Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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