A lovely, nuanced collaboration.
When Zola moves into the house next door, a young girl imagines all of the reasons why a friendship between them is impossible.
Spying a giant moving box, the narrator immediately concludes that it contains Zola’s pet elephant. Smelling toast, she imagines Zola merrily feeding her pet. In contrast, Zola is shown in a room piled with drab boxes, despondently taking tea and toast with only her pet bird for company. Each brightly bedecked fantasy about Zola and her pachyderm playmate is a facet of the narrator’s cloaked fear of rejection by the newcomer. Readers are poignantly aware, through Zagarenski’s contrasting gray compositions of Zola’s actual circumstances, that she’s lonely and bored. Finally, the narrator’s lively imaginings provoke both curiosity and courage: “I like stories… / and clubhouses / and playing hide-and-seek / and taking bubble baths / with elephants.” Her own stuffed elephant under one arm, she knocks on Zola’s door, discovering that the huge crate contains—a sofa. “Okay, so maybe Zola doesn’t have an elephant. / But do you know what she does have? // A new friend.” De Sève’s well-paced telling is charmingly abetted by Zagarenski’s layered multimedia paintings. The artist’s Klee-esque colors and signature symbols—stars, crowns, houses, bees, and more—will provide fertile ground for young readers’ own imaginings. They depict both girls as pale-skinned, the narrator with fluffy red hair and Zola with straight, black hair.
A lovely, nuanced collaboration. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-88629-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
A stocking stuffer par excellence, just right for dishing up with milk and cookies.
Pigeon finds something better to drive than some old bus.
This time it’s Santa delivering the fateful titular words, and with a “Ho. Ho. Whoa!” the badgering begins: “C’mon! Where’s your holiday spirit? It would be a Christmas MIRACLE! Don’t you want to be part of a Christmas miracle…?” Pigeon is determined: “I can do Santa stuff!” Like wrapping gifts (though the accompanying illustration shows a rather untidy present), delivering them (the image of Pigeon attempting to get an oversize sack down a chimney will have little ones giggling), and eating plenty of cookies. Alas, as Willems’ legion of young fans will gleefully predict, not even Pigeon’s by-now well-honed persuasive powers (“I CAN BE JOLLY!”) will budge the sleigh’s large and stinky reindeer guardian. “BAH. Also humbug.” In the typically minimalist art, the frustrated feathered one sports a floppily expressive green and red elf hat for this seasonal addition to the series—but then discards it at the end for, uh oh, a pair of bunny ears. What could Pigeon have in mind now? “Egg delivery, anyone?”
A stocking stuffer par excellence, just right for dishing up with milk and cookies. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781454952770
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Union Square Kids
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
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