A winner for young sky watchers with stars…or cheese…in their eyes.
With that big ball of cheese hanging so temptingly in the sky, what’s a pair of hungry mice to do?
Marching to a pared-down rhyme of just three or four words per line, Alpaugh’s cute and capable mice determinedly gather tools and materials, design and build a rocket, and blast off. They touch down on a surface more like Roquefort than regolith and emerge from the capsule, equipped with a cleverly designed lunar backhoe: “Landing, standing / on the moon. / that’s one small step— / and one big spoon!” After they’ve stuffed themselves, there’s nothing left for an astonished young human astronomer back on Earth to see but a thin crescent. Presenting white, this child gapes up at the suddenly no-longer-full moon as the mouse astronauts tow their reentry capsule—and one last piece of moon—off the page. There’s lots of humor on the pages, from the mice wielding full-size human tools to a cheese-loving stowaway ant. A Right Stuff head-on view of the spacesuited mice, helmets under their arms, is particularly chuckleworthy. The venture recalls Andy Mansfield’s Journey to the Moon (2015), with its similarly cheesy climax, but it also pairs well with other extraterrestrial trips such as Dan Yaccarino’s Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! I’m Off to the Moon! (1997; tragically, out of print) and Nancy Shaw and Margo Apple’s Sheep Blast Off! (2008).
A winner for young sky watchers with stars…or cheese…in their eyes. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8075-7553-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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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Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the...
Rhymed couplets convey the story of a girl who likes to build things but is shy about it. Neither the poetry nor Rosie’s projects always work well.
Rosie picks up trash and oddments where she finds them, stashing them in her attic room to work on at night. Once, she made a hat for her favorite zookeeper uncle to keep pythons away, and he laughed so hard that she never made anything publicly again. But when her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit and reminds Rosie of her own past building airplanes, she expresses her regret that she still has not had the chance to fly. Great-great-aunt Rose is visibly modeled on Rosie the Riveter, the iconic, red-bandanna–wearing poster woman from World War II. Rosie decides to build a flying machine and does so (it’s a heli-o-cheese-copter), but it fails. She’s just about to swear off making stuff forever when Aunt Rose congratulates her on her failure; now she can go on to try again. Rosie wears her hair swooped over one eye (just like great-great-aunt Rose), and other figures have exaggerated hairdos, tiny feet and elongated or greatly rounded bodies. The detritus of Rosie’s collections is fascinating, from broken dolls and stuffed animals to nails, tools, pencils, old lamps and possibly an erector set. And cheddar-cheese spray.
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the right place. (historical note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0845-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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