Crisp design, her hallmark typeface (Century Standard), and touches of whimsy combine for another delightful garden tour...
Deploying her signature graphics, Ehlert digs into familiar turf, depicting a vegetable garden whose pests are handily dispatched by a resident mole.
Mole narrates a staccato, rhyming text that matches her dine-and-dash lifestyle. She eats beneficial organisms like earthworms but also often devours such destructive infiltrators as the tomato hornworm and the cabbage caterpillar. Ehlert’s reductive paper collages depict Mole’s habitat as a vibrant scarlet tunnel threading an underground teeming with insects, worms, and the roots of neatly labeled, rapidly growing vegetables. Mole is cut (with pinking shears!) of fibrous gray paper and sports bright pink forefeet, tail, and snout. Angleworms are amusingly represented as red zigzags, and moths, worms, and grubs masquerade as facial features for the sun and several phases of the moon. The garden’s season is a strong visual theme. A seed potato sprouts and grows tubers and leaves (with Mole neatly nipping an infestation of potato beetles); the plant’s impressive underground bounty fans out across a double spread. As the garden grows, so does Mole: “my burrow seems small. Holey Moley! / I’m a fat fur ball.” Reclining against a mountainous veggie harvest, Mole muses on a new-home search. Slyly, she addresses readers: “Do you think I could move in with you?”
Crisp design, her hallmark typeface (Century Standard), and touches of whimsy combine for another delightful garden tour from Ehlert. (visual glossary of garden fauna) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4424-9301-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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