An enjoyable book for young readers ready for mild scares.
Don’t text and drive—or fly. In his debut picture book, Jordan shows that it’s a lesson a witch is never too young to learn.
Annica lives on One Creepy Street, where her neighbors are “wizards and lizards and a mean old warlock. / Some were weird and others plain scary, / A few had retired including an evil tooth fairy.” When she turns 13, her mother lets her set off on a new broom all by herself, but warns her to keep her eyes on the road—well, the sky—and her hands off her phone. It’s easy to guess how long young Annica’s resolve lasts on that count. Almost immediately, she crashes out of the sky and finds herself looking into the frightening face of Officer Tate. The one-eyed policeman “gnawed on the [rotten] apple with his jaw set firm, / and between his teeth was crawling one-half of a worm.” Jordan doesn’t shy away from details that young readers will find deliciously creepy. Officer Tate takes Annica to find someone on One Creepy Street who can help her fix her broom. A purplish troll chained to a bridge “snorted and grumped and swatted a nagging horse fly. / The carcass fell into the pan, a new seasoning to try.” But the troll refuses to help her, as does Mort the Mortician and a diabolical fallen elf who delights in breaking limbs off dolls. Annica’s plight prompts the elf toward his own epiphany: He’s sick of being bad and willing to help her out, if it means a chance to go back to the North Pole. In any case, as Officer Tate points out, Annica has learned her lesson. Jordan creates a satisfyingly detailed world on One Creepy Street, filled with characters who could have been easy clichés but are instead fresh and a little bit funny. He keeps the creep factor age-appropriate, while giving gross-out–loving kids exactly what they want. The singsong tone wears thin, and there are places where the meanings of words are stretched a tad too far just to make a rhyme, but the plot and characters move quickly enough to carry the book, and the brightly colored illustrations feature characters with extremely detailed and expressive faces.
An enjoyable book for young readers ready for mild scares.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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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