Offers an opportunity for conversation with young readers about the roles of zoos and aquariums.
Captured and confined for display to visitors in an aquarium, an octopus tires of his unvarying routine there and escapes to return to the ocean home he loves.
This satisfying home-away-home narrative imagines life from an octopus’s perspective. The story begins and ends in his comfortable cave, where he can watch sea creatures going about their business and feel the variety of water currents. His love for hiding in small spaces leads to capture. He’s bored in his new home in a “glass house that wasn’t a cave.” For entertainment, he’s given manipulatives, and the food is regular but unvarying—and certainly no challenge to catch. He’s taught to take pictures of and with the aquarium visitors. With no good way to communicate his feelings to his keeper, he leaves, slithering out of his tank and under a door to a convenient pier from which he can return to the water—and, after a long swim, to his home. The relatively simple text is nicely interwoven with cheerful illustrations, sometimes set on spreads, sometimes interrupted with vignettes, and sometimes on a page opposite a full-bleed image. It would read and show well to a group. This effort to see the world from the viewpoint of a captive species reflects actual experiences of some octopuses resident in New Zealand aquariums.
Offers an opportunity for conversation with young readers about the roles of zoos and aquariums. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: May 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984812-69-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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