Entertaining, immersive fun.
The denizens of Brown Bear Wood keep busy, from morning to night.
Right away, readers meet the jovial, all-animal cast, learn about their important, specialized jobs, and are invited to play challenging seek-and-find games. Writing in engaging verse that scans well, Piercey introduces each location, from the Honey Pot Library, where librarian Papa Bear reads stories to a host of rapt young animals, to the Woodland Hospital, where Dr. Deer, Nurse Pigeon, and the rest of the medical team gently tend to their patients. The seek-and-find element is a rousing success; kids will have a blast attempting to locate Grandma Toad in the market or the baby mice blowing bubbles on the playground. Ideal for honing visual skills, these puzzles are quite detailed; each is accompanied by a lengthy key listing objects or characters for readers to locate. They may prove more diverting if shared with a group—and perhaps easier, as the items are quite tiny. In any case, this bouncy offering, originally published in the U.K., will keep readers as busy as the characters. Drawn in pencil and colored digitally, the charming woodland scenes call to mind Richard Scarry’s work, particularly the intricate cutaways. A final page includes several job-related questions for readers to ask the adults in their lives: “Where do you work?” “What is a typical day like for you?”
Entertaining, immersive fun. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 17, 2025
ISBN: 9781419777004
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Magic Cat
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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