Young readers will be happy to read and reread this dynamic data on their duffs.
An informational hymn to your handsome heinie.
Yes, butts are everywhere, and everyone has one: your fellow family members, your friends, even famous people. Butts have many names: “haunches,” “cheeks,” “keister,” “caboose,” “booty,” “patootie,” and many more, each one rendered in its own style on a double-page spread devoted to this particular set of synonyms. However, your “can” is more than just something to laugh at (or to not mention in polite society). “Your gluteus maximus will propel you into the air if you jump, and your buns will catch you if you fall.” Many animals have butts. Some that don’t include whales, worms, and jellyfish. And animals use their butts for varied activities: Dogs learn about other dogs with a sniff; turtles breathe with their rears, and manatees “toot” to swim faster. And speaking of the fantastic fart, everyone does it, from bees to elephants (humans are no exception!). Yes, there are billions of buttocks in the world, but everyone’s is unique and perfect as it is. Stutzman’s occasionally rhyming text gets the poots—er, points across handily. Little listeners may giggle (a lot), but, in the tradition of Taro Gomi’s venerable Everyone Poops (1993), this cleverly informs on a topic all and sundry may not be completely comfortable talking about and entertains in the process. Fox’s colorful cartoon illustrations of joyous butt-owners of many skin tones displaying their derrieres double the fun. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads at 61.4% of actual size.)
Young readers will be happy to read and reread this dynamic data on their duffs. (Picture book. 2-8)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51451-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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