Brumbeau and de Marcken (The Quiltmaker’s Gift, 2001) turn their attention from a kindly but determined quilter and a greedy king to a kindly queen and a determined lady who wears a Parisian hat with a live chicken on top. The conventional townspeople are outraged at this fashion faux pas, as their queen is due to arrive for a visit, and they are sure that Miss Hunnicutt and her hat will be an embarrassment. When the queen arrives with her own unusual hat sporting a live turkey, she trades hats with Miss Hunnicutt and invites her to the palace for a party. The townspeople immediately all start wearing hats with various fowl on top, but Miss Hunnicutt, style setter that she is, moves on to an even more unusual hat, with a porcupine to suit her rather prickly nature. De Marcken’s busy watercolor illustrations provide lots of amusing details in panoramic views of the old-fashioned town, including a poster-sized representation on the reverse side of the volume’s jacket. The endpapers show Miss Hunnicutt trying on an astonishing assortment of hats with living decorations, which might have made an intriguing story themselves. Though the hats with live adornment have a certain amount of appeal, the overly long, somewhat pedantic story fails to convey in a meaningful way the intended message of respecting individual style, and the story’s attempts at humor never achieve a satisfying fit. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-439-31895-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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