Beware: an unquestioningly Eurocentric salute to brick-and-mortar museums.
Wolf’s reluctant visit to a museum turns out to be exciting in more ways than anyone could have foreseen.
“There once was a wolf who didn’t like museums. ‘Museums are boring,’ he told everyone.” In fact, when Wolf’s animal friends show up to invite him, he goes along solely for the company of curly-lashed lupine Wolfette. Wolf and friends are cartoons with wide, round eyes, wearing a few human accessories. The first museum room is a double-page spread of an art gallery, containing portraits with humorous, wolflike resemblance to world-famous subjects. Older readers will chuckle at the artists’ names, which include Leonardo da Wolfinci and Wolfmeer. Wolf soon meets museum guard Barnabas, a rat in a blue uniform. Barnabas begins to help Wolf appreciate the artwork until he learns that a “tribal mask” has disappeared from its pedestal in the "early art" gallery. Searching for the mask, the two new friends move past interactive exhibits, natural history dioramas, dinosaur skeletons, and more. Barnabas imparts museum etiquette and wisdom to Wolf as Wolf uses logic and observation to track down and expose the thief. Wolf evolves from indifferent visitor to active promoter, and even the thief finds museum-inspired happiness. The lack of specificity around non-European cultures in both text and illustrations, and the unfortunate—if not downright racist—implications behind the simian-appearing thief’s reasons for stealing the generic “tribal mask” mar the intended endorsement of museums.
Beware: an unquestioningly Eurocentric salute to brick-and-mortar museums. (Picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-2-7338-6740-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Auzou Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound.
The titular cookie runs off the page at a bookstore storytime, pursued by young listeners and literary characters.
Following on 13 previous How To Catch… escapades, Wallace supplies sometimes-tortured doggerel and Elkerton, a set of helter-skelter cartoon scenes. Here the insouciant narrator scampers through aisles, avoiding a series of elaborate snares set by the racially diverse young storytime audience with help from some classic figures: “Alice and her mad-hat friends, / as a gift for my unbirthday, / helped guide me through the walls of shelves— / now I’m bound to find my way.” The literary helpers don’t look like their conventional or Disney counterparts in the illustrations, but all are clearly identified by at least a broad hint or visual cue, like the unnamed “wizard” who swoops in on a broom to knock over a tower labeled “Frogwarts.” Along with playing a bit fast and loose with details (“Perhaps the boy with the magic beans / saved me with his cow…”) the author discards his original’s lip-smacking climax to have the errant snack circling back at last to his book for a comfier sort of happily-ever-after.
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7282-0935-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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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