How this unusual family finds exactly what they were missing makes for a satisfying tale.
The traditional fairy tale gets a Halloween update and an adoption twist.
Readers paying attention will notice the setup at the start of the tale: The haunted house the Scares live in is big enough for four but houses only three: Papa Scare (Frankenstein’s monster), Mama Scare (a green-skinned mummy with Bride-of-Frankenstein hair), and Baby Scare (a tiny, redheaded, pale-skinned vampire tot). Papa’s recipe makes four servings of Alpha-Bat Soup; Mama wishes for an assistant to help her in the lab; and Baby wants a playmate. On this night, the soup is too hot to eat, so the three take ghost-dog Plasma out for a walk. Meanwhile, Moldilocks, a green-skinned, black-haired zombie girl, is sleepwalking, her nose drawing her toward the smell of soup…and home. The rest unspools as the familiar tale does, albeit with some interesting décor in the house and a fly that may be Moldilocks’ pet. The dark and spooky spread in which Moldilocks awakens to find the Scares’ shadows looming over her (“How dare you…”) resolves on the next page with a warm welcome into the family: “…eat without us!” “And they lived hauntingly ever after.” Lorenzo’s acrylic-and–colored-pencil illustrations feature rich and vivid colors; lots of bones, skulls, and spiderwebs make up most of the home’s ambience.
How this unusual family finds exactly what they were missing makes for a satisfying tale. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4549-3061-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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