Overall, an agreeable world tour.
A house cat with just two lives left visits his extended family around the world.
Felix numbers among his many friends the cushions he sleeps on and his owner’s legs, but one hot night he decides to meet those family members he’s never seen. He leaves “the way cats always leave when they want to see the world—silently, through a little door in the darkness.” In India, he visits the Tigers, eats shrimp, and drinks mango juice; in China, he has tea and herrings with Mr. and Mrs. Snow Leopard; in Russia, Mr. Lynx offers him blini; in the United States, he has steak with Mr. Puma; in Brazil, his “mysterious” cousin the panther gives him kebabs; and on the African savanna, he catches up on his sleep with a pride of lions. Felix’s travelogue shares many of the faults of the form—the relegation of cultural nuance to named foodstuffs, a whiff of exoticism, and, in particular, the equation of Africa to individual countries—but its presumably European perspective (this is an Italian import) means that American readers are treated to a vision of the U.S. that’s as reductive as all too many U.S. travelogues are of the rest of the world. Mulazzani’s luscious paintings place gray Felix (clad in blue vest and ever changing plaid shorts) in dreamlike yet friendly global scenarios. Zoboli’s text in Watkinson’s translation is just as plush and whimsical.
Overall, an agreeable world tour. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5506-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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