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JACKALOPE

What should be a whimsical tale of the fictitious desert critter found on so many postcards in the Southwest instead becomes a labored slog through a confused tall-fairy-tale landscape. It begins and ends on the endpapers, as a genial armadillo approaches the reader, sets up a folding chair, and launches into the story. This frame produces a series of sub-frames as the armadillo takes the role of balladeer, introducing segments of his story with cowboy doggerel. It turns out that the famed horned hare began life as a perfectly, and unhappily, ordinary jackrabbit. Various conversations with his magic mirror apparently summon his Fairy Godrabbit, a painful punster, who grants him horns and an accompanying Pinocchio-like curse that causes his horns to grow whenever he tells a lie. The meandering tale goes on and on until the armadillo ambles off after the exhausting conclusion. Stevens’s art, a computer-enhanced combination of painting and collage, features her signature energetic line, but here it crosses the boundary into frenetic. As does the narrative itself: line and bright colors cannot sustain a text that simply does not seem to know when to end. Crummel and Stevens’s previous collaborations (And the Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, 2001, etc.) have shown a distinct tendency toward self-referential narrative; this offering, with its promising concept, carries this style into self-indulgent. (Picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: April 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-15-216736-6

Page Count: 56

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003

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DIARY OF A SPIDER

The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005

ISBN: 0-06-000153-4

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005

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THE WONKY DONKEY

Hee haw.

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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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