A cautionary tale on the hazards of distracted driving? If anything, just the opposite, but it’s sure a lot of fun.
Silly results turn a multivehicle accident into a street party in this onomatopoeic import.
Spread-filling iterations of the title or a long screech appearing at every other page turn prompt young audiences to chime in on the noise. It all starts when a deer driving a yellow roadster while reading (a book, not a cellphone) hits a garbage can (“BANG”), then takes a rear-end hit from a hog driving a truck full of chickens (“BANG”) who become festooned with fashion accessories after a collision (“BANG”) with the giraffe on the way home from the store, and so on. Subsequent tailgating motorists shower the growing chaos with tires, fish, veggies, little bunnies, paint and, in a climactic four-page foldout panorama, ice cream. Just to give the escalating catastrophe/frolic a more surreal air, Timmers wildly exaggerates his animal cast’s features and expressions and adds high-sheen highlights to the surfaces of his brightly colored, sharply defined scenes. Carping critics and motor-safety wonks may be displeased to see all of the victims laughing at the way their flying cargoes end up adorning all and sundry. The violence here is strictly cartoon-style though, with no harm done and ice cream for all at the end.
A cautionary tale on the hazards of distracted driving? If anything, just the opposite, but it’s sure a lot of fun. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-8775-7918-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Gecko Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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