The award-winning author’s style adapts well to the brevity and pace of a traditional story, and this humorous take could...
After telling her squabbling daughters not to let in strangers, Mother goes to the village, but what should appear but a smiling, kerchief-clad tiger pretending to be “Auntie”?
Big Sister detects Auntie’s tiger-like characteristics, but stubborn and lazy Little Sister foolishly believes that the visitor is bringing good things to eat and opens the door to the wily tiger, who eats her. Quick-thinking Big Sister devises an ingenious way to kill the tiger and rescue her younger sister, paving the way to the usual happy ending. Lee’s paintings depict a fantastic forest and interior scenes with details of rural Chinese dress and household furnishings, the human and animal characters displaying animated movements and cartoon-like expressions. The jacket flap notes that Yep has “adapted a Chinese tiger version” of “Little Red Riding Hood,” but there are no substantive notes of the tale’s provenance.
The award-winning author’s style adapts well to the brevity and pace of a traditional story, and this humorous take could well be a lead-in to the darker and far more intriguing Lon Po Po. (Picture book/folktale. 5-8)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-029551-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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BOOK REVIEW
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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