An often delightful, unexpected coming-of-age tale that unlocks the story behind a youngster’s silence.
A debut children’s tale of a traumatized girl’s journey to discover her own special gifts.
“She was only four when the accident happened, but she remembered her mother’s lap.” With this haunting sentence, Bell hints at a likely explanation for why her main character doesn’t speak. The author wisely leaves that part of the story dangling, though, creating suspense as she explores the world of Molly, an 8-year-old orphan who can’t, or won’t, talk. Molly begins to believe what she hears people saying about her—that a cat got her tongue. But even though she doesn’t speak, she hears more than most other people do. Like Dr. Doolittle, she can communicate with animals, and she finds friends in spiders, dogs, and cats. She partners with cocker spaniel Rusty and black Labrador Tony to track down the cat who stole her tongue. Bell’s depictions of Rusty’s antics are captivating; for example, he loves the smell of the garbage dump and makes a game out of distracting a farmer who’s angry at the trio for sleeping in his barn. Rusty also explains that cats talk to him: “They call me names when I chase them. FLAP-EARS, SLOBBER FACE, STINKY FUR-BALL.” With the help of her animal friends, Molly unlocks her ability to talk and solves the mystery of why the town’s cats have been disappearing. Overall, this book offers a fun glimpse into the world of animals as humans imagine it, and Martin’s black-and-white drawings, which appear to have been done in charcoal or pencil, gently add dimension to Bell’s words. However, some of its characterizations fall short. For example, the author predictably depicts Max, the cat that Molly believes took her tongue, as rough but with a heart of gold. Similarly, Molly’s aunt feels like a caricature of a heartless relative stuck with a child she doesn’t want. Still, these flaws only minimally detract from the overall story.
An often delightful, unexpected coming-of-age tale that unlocks the story behind a youngster’s silence.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Ambient Light Publishers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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