Nethery includes both fact and fancy in her account of a stray cat’s elevation to celebrity status in 1890s Venice. Nini wanders into Nonna Framboni’s coffee shop one day, and, miraculously, his presence immediately improves the struggling shop’s bottom line. First, the composer Verdi stops by for a coffee and hears the perfect note in Nini’s meow. Then artists search for inspiration in his glowing green eyes, and poets seek him out as a potential muse. Royalty from various countries visit and send gifts, and even the pope makes a pilgrimage to meet the famous Nini. Many of these encounters actually occurred, although the author acknowledges embellishing the details. Manders’s illustrations, rendered in gouache and colored pencil, capture the humor implicit in the text’s (and Nonna Framboni’s) gentle hyperbole. Expressions, both human and feline, are often amusingly exaggerated, and the setting is simplified but well realized, ensuring that the focus remains squarely on the characters and their actions. Nonetheless it’s difficult to determine who might best appreciate this reimagining of admittedly obscure historical events. Pleasant but, perhaps, ultimately inconsequential. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: June 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-618-97769-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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