Donohue follows up Alfie the Apostrophe (2006), illustrared by JoAnn Adinolfi, with another parade of animate punctuation—featuring this time a Period, a Question Mark and an obnoxious Exclamation Point! Round Penny and her slouching friend Quentin vow to beat bouncy Elsie by creating more sentences correctly in their school’s upcoming bee. One by one other contestants like Collin the Colon are eliminated until, after a hard-fought contest, Penny scores the tiebreaker with an extra-credit statement using not one but two periods: “Mr. Dash is my teacher.” Carping critics may note that under these rules the contest would always be a walkaway for the Comma—but never mind. Wielding broad brushes filled with what looks like poster paint, Law fashions a bright world populated by colorful, easily recognizable punctuation of all sorts. Will young readers enjoy this Period of learning? You bet! For children (or, for that matter, parents) who are still hazy on the uses of the three marks, the author discusses types of sentences in an explanatory afterword. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8075-6477-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
Scotton makes a stylish debut with this tale of a sleepless sheep—depicted as a blocky, pop-eyed, very soft-looking woolly with a skinny striped nightcap of unusual length—trying everything, from stripping down to his spotted shorts to counting all six hundred million billion and ten stars, twice, in an effort to doze off. Not even counting sheep . . . well, actually, that does work, once he counts himself. Dawn finds him tucked beneath a rather-too-small quilt while the rest of his flock rises to bathe, brush and riffle through the Daily Bleat. Russell doesn’t have quite the big personality of Ian Falconer’s Olivia, but more sophisticated fans of the precocious piglet will find in this art the same sort of daffy urbanity. Quite a contrast to the usual run of ovine-driven snoozers, like Phyllis Root’s Ten Sleepy Sheep, illustrated by Susan Gaber (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059848-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
The creators of Punctuation Takes a Vacation (2003) sentence readers to a good time with this follow-up. Feeling left out after the children in Mr. Wright’s class thunder outside for a Field Day, the nouns and verbs left in the classroom decide to organize events of their own. But having chosen like parts of speech for partners—“Glue, Markers and Tape stuck together. Shout wanted to be with Cheer. So did Chew and Eat.”—it quickly becomes apparent that as opposing teams they can’t actually do anything. Depicting the Nouns as objects and the Verbs as hyperactive v-shaped figures, Rowe creates a set of high-energy scenes, climaxing in a Tug of Words and other contests once the participants figure out that they’ll work better mixed rather than matched. This playful introduction to words recalls Ruth Heller’s Kites Sail High (1998) and Merry-Go-Round (1990) for liveliness, and closes with several simple exercises and games to get children into the act. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-8234-1982-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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