Kasza’s lively signature watercolor illustrations are the icing on this brightly colored cake.
Birthdays should be great fun. How awesome will Alligator Al’s be?
Alligator Al’s ready to find himself a big treat for his birthday when there’s a knock at his door. It’s a piglet! What luck! Al snatches the piglet and ties him in a potato sack despite the piggy’s protests that it’s his birthday, too. Al begins preparing to cook up his birthday visitor, but the piglet points out that no birthday’s complete without a birthday cake. Al agrees and follows the piglet’s instructions for making a yummy cake. Then the piglet reminds him awesome guys deserve fancy decorations on their birthdays. Al decorates, and he’s ready to start on his feast when the piglet says there ought to be guests; he offers to call his friends. With visions of a month’s—or a year’s!—worth of piglets, Al eagerly agrees...but piglet’s friends turn out to be a fearsome rhino, hippo, boar and gorilla! Al flees in fright, leaving Piglet and friends to celebrate in style. With this tale of turnabouts, storytime favorite Kasza delivers a sly companion to My Lucky Day (2003), adding a postscript that gives extra insight into the disingenuous porker’s M.O. Audiences of one or many will chortle at the trickery.
Kasza’s lively signature watercolor illustrations are the icing on this brightly colored cake. (Picture book. 2-7)Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25763-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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
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A forgettable effort that fails to capture any of the magical charm of Santa’s story. (Picture book. 3-6)
Wallace and Elkerton continue their series about catching elusive mythical creatures (How to Catch a Leprechaun, 2016, etc.) with this Christmas story about an elf who must avoid traps constructed by children before Santa’s annual visit.
The unnamed elf narrator is the sole helper traveling with Santa on his delivery rounds on Christmas Eve, with each house featuring a different type of trap for elves. The spunky elf avoids a mechanical “elf snatcher,” hidden in a plate of cookies, as well as simple traps made of tinsel, double-sided tape, and a cardboard box concealing a mean-looking cat. Another trap looks like a bomb hidden in a box of candy, and a complicated trap in a maze has an evil cowboy clown with a branding iron, leading to the elf’s cry, “Hey, you zapped my tushy!” The bomb trap and the branding iron seem to push the envelope of child-made inventions. The final trap is located in a family grocery store that’s booby-trapped with a “Dinner Cannon” shooting out food, including a final pizza that the elf and Santa share. The singsong, rhyming text has a forced cheeriness, full of golly-jolly-holly Christmas spirit and too many exclamation marks, as well as rhyming word pairs that miss the mark. (No, little elf-boy, “smarter” and “harder” do not rhyme.) Bold, busy illustrations in a cartoon style have a cheeky appeal with a focus on the freckle-faced white elf with auburn curls and a costume with a retro vibe. (Santa is also white.)
A forgettable effort that fails to capture any of the magical charm of Santa’s story. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4631-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2016
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