A labor of love, both a fitting tribute to its poet creator and a grand reimagining, thanks to incredible artistic skills.
The late Hoberman’s eclectic, posthumously published collection of high-spirited rhymes, riddles, and limericks focuses on the animal kingdom.
Hoberman selected her favorite bestiary poems from over six decades (some long out of print), then wrote an additional eight more for this stirring collaborative compendium with Frazee. Frazee introduces the concept of an animal hotel, and every entry slots so neatly into this form that readers will honestly believe the poems were written especially for this book. What was once a haphazard conglomeration of disparate poems becomes, with these pictures, almost a story about an assortment of quirky hotel guests. As one might expect, the poems vary in quality but have occasional flashes of brilliance, as with the poem “Dragonfly” (“You get what you eat with your feet when you hunt / While you fly which is why your six feet are up front”). Many of Hoberman’s poems adeptly incorporate scientific facts—for instance, a daddy longlegs can regrow its limbs, while ants follow one another based on scent trails. At times, the art provides a delightfully ironic contrast: “Lion” describes a threatening “Mighty beast,” while Frazee depicts the big cat getting a dye job at the hairdresser’s.
A labor of love, both a fitting tribute to its poet creator and a grand reimagining, thanks to incredible artistic skills. (Poetry. 4-10)Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9780316417129
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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