Carrying on where they left off with Wild About Books (2004), their Seuss homage, Sierra and Brown find the good citizens of Springfield, and especially the residents of the zoo, overcome by the doldrums of winter.
It’s windy and cold and snowy, and the sky can’t get any lower. Leave it to two young’uns—a hippo and a kangaroo—to light the kind of fire that will get folks up and moving. In this case, a musical—or, more appropriately, a ZooZical—in which all the animals find a niche and partake in a peaceable kingdom mega-performance. Sierra and Brown have worked together enough by now to feel comfortable in each other’s presence. They play off one another extremely well. Sierra’s rhymed text is playful, with sassy touches—“Then on to the stage rolled ten seals on a bus, / Barking, ‘Let’s sing a tune that is all about us!’ ”—and her pacing is peerless. In lockstep with the proceedings are Brown’s illustrations: merry and alive with energy. Here the raccoons are doing a jitterbug, there the snakes are exuberantly tying themselves into knots, while chorus lines of giraffes and macaques step out in style. A book of sheer exuberance—vocal and visual—which surely will be reflected during read-alouds. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-86847-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
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
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Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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