Thoroughly misconceived and poorly executed.
An adverbial tour from sea to shining sea.
As in Sutton’s similarly constructed I Love You Animally (illustrated by Hazel Mitchell, 2015), the repetition of “I love you” quickly transforms sweet sentiment into monotonous litany. The text darts back and forth over the continent as the author struggles, with only fitful success, to find rhyming locales to highlight: “I love you energetically like NYC. // I love you simply like the stark Mohave. / I love you anciently like the Southwestern ruins. / I love you greatly like the Colorado dunes,” etc. Most of the selected adverbs are interchangeable anyway, and many are either arbitrary (“I love you diversely like the Texas Big Bend”) or esoteric. Greenburg’s simple images help out with some of the latter, such as “I love you duckily like the Public Garden’s flowers” (think Robert McCloskey), but the illustrator depicts a cannon instead of a “Gettysburg mortar,” forces a batter into a painfully awkward swing, and closes with a perfunctory map on which only a few of the journey’s stops appear. She does use a range of pinks and browns to color in the faces of her small human figures.
Thoroughly misconceived and poorly executed. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61067-511-6
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be...
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip.
The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface.
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work.
A young spinach hater becomes a spinach lover after she has to grow her own in a class garden.
Unable to trade away the seed packet she gets from her teacher for tomatoes, cukes or anything else more palatable, Sylvia reluctantly plants and nurtures a pot of the despised veggie then transplants it outside in early spring. By the end of school, only the plot’s lettuce, radishes and spinach are actually ready to eat (talk about a badly designed class project!)—and Sylvia, once she nerves herself to take a nibble, discovers that the stuff is “not bad.” She brings home an armful and enjoys it from then on in every dish: “And that was the summer Sylvia Spivens said yes to spinach.” Raff uses unlined brushwork to give her simple cartoon illustrations a pleasantly freehand, airy look, and though Pryor skips over the (literally, for spinach) gritty details in both the story and an afterword, she does cover gardening basics in a simple and encouraging way.
Very young gardeners will need more information, but for certain picky eaters, the suggested strategy just might work. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9836615-1-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Readers to Eaters
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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