Elwood the pig’s chance encounter with a witch’s broom sets magic in motion. Shuffling through the woods one moonlit evening, he comes across a broomstick. “This will do nicely to keep my front step swept,” he figures. But when he grabs the broomstick and it begins to shimmy and shake and drag him across the mossy ground, he gets an intimation that all is not what it seems. When it flies off into the night sky with Elwood aboard, and a witch comes crashing out of the underbrush—“She had been in the woods collecting bitter roots and poisonous toadstools when she saw Elwood go sailing past”—he knows just what he has gotten himself into. The witch demands the broom’s return; Elwood would be only too happy but he can’t—“I don’t know how!” The witch isn’t listening. She threatens and then hurls a spell at Elwood. It misses, hits an unsuspecting bat, which is turned into a trout. Then a cloud is transformed into a giant toad when the spell skirts past Elwood. All the while Elwood is shouting that he can’t control the broomstick, but the witch, raving with imprecations, is deaf to Elwood’s pleas. Only when she turns the Moon into a great bumblebee with another wayward spell, and the bee says she’ll give the witch a good stinging unless she is turned back into the moon, does the witch pipe down. She directs Elwood to earth, and considers turning him into a worm, but the Moon is now guarding Elwood, who continues on his night stroll. A pleasing enough tale, simply written with sly, subtle humor, though mostly a platform for the illustrations, which are grand spreads of emotion and activity and deep color. Capturing the bright clueless look in Elwood’s eyes and a touch of the sinister in the witch’s raging expression, Smith creates exactly the right amount of hysteria to put the story over the top. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-16945-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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