Energy and imagination reign from the Irish author-illustrator of Lizzie and Skunk. A boy asks the cat on the brick wall next to his house if he’s a tiger, and for a while, they are tigers together. The landscape and the protagonists transmogrify as the backyard becomes a lush jungle and the boy and the cat become striped. But then, “Oh, don’t go! / I don’t want to be a tiger all alone.” Next, the boy asks his dog if he’s a wolf, and boy and dog howl at the moon. The dog slinks away, too, and next a laundry basket and a fishpond turn the boy and a fish into sailors on the sea. But the fish goes and the boy is left alone by the brick wall once again. Meanwhile, on the other side of that wall, a family is moving in to an old house. There’s a boy: “I’m a boy like you,” he says, but our hero points out that he’s a “Tiger-Wolf-Sailor on the Sea” and asks if he’ll be a tiger, too. The new boy responds that “we’ll be tigers two.” The soft, clean watercolors limn each transformation gently: the boy is always wearing his T-shirt even when he’s slightly furry and has wolf ears, or is striped and clawed. The landscape shimmers from backyard to moonlit forest to ocean and back again in a perfect sense of pretend. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7613-1498-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
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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