Creative concept and wordplay with playful illustration you can enjoy with your thumbs.
The titular question is explored in rhyming verse.
Visually, this book screams for attention with its illustrations in intense neon colors and striking contrasts (think dandelion yellow and magenta highlighted with cherry red or royal blue, magenta, and dandelion yellow accented with gold). Dog fans will love the main character—a shaggy canine that oozes personality and thrives on an adventure-filled, if imaginary, life. Word lovers will jump into the fun and ponder the question: “Would she walk around town shaking hands with all of her chums?” A spotted dog’s paw and the protagonist’s clasp across the gutter. “Would she go to the store, just to explore / what she could wear on the dance floor?” She boogies in blue jeans beneath a disco ball. The possibilities are endless, and each one is just a bit more complicated and unlikely than the one before. The rhyme isn’t always perfect, but the wordplay, always fun and sometimes philosophical, just asks to be read aloud. “Would she pick apples and make a pie? / Would she close her eyes and try to touch the sky?” The unstudied, playful aesthetic encourages readers to embrace the looniness and have fun creating their own imaginative rhymes. No possibility is too silly.
Creative concept and wordplay with playful illustration you can enjoy with your thumbs. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948340-09-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Dottir Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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