Chirpy reassurance that size doesn’t matter, even if we can’t all be descended from dinosaurs.
When a hawk threatens, Dee the chickadee takes a cue from her “sixty-million-times great-great-great-grandmother.”
Echoing beleaguered children everywhere, little Dee complains that she doesn’t like being small—whereupon her Mama informs her that she is descended from a monster with “BIG CHOMPING TEETH,” a “MASSIVE CRUSHING TAIL,” and an enormous “ROAR” and that even though the world has changed over time, she still has her monster ancestor’s bones and feathers. Confidence restored, Dee slips through the pushy bigger birds clustered around the feeder to chow down, adroitly avoids a red tailed hawk’s snapping beak…and then, seeing the hawk heading for a nest of defenseless hatchling jays, screws her courage to the sticking place and utters a tree-shaking “CHICK-A-DEE-DEE-DEE!” Is that enough to scare off the hawk? Presumably so, though viewers will have to fill in that part for themselves, as Henderson just switches to a closing view of the preening avian mite. Looking like painted paper collages, the illustrations add bright notes of brushed and overlaid color in depictions of both contemporary and prehistoric scenes.
Chirpy reassurance that size doesn’t matter, even if we can’t all be descended from dinosaurs. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781951836665
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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