A dreamy and slightly surreal picture book with a truly odd visual kink. A boy and a girl, Sam and Jo, are playing in a field of dandelions on a languorous summer’s day. Sam tells Jo that if you blow all the dandelion seeds in one breath, your wish comes true—so they do, and it does. An incredible carnival appears, with a mermaid, a dinosaur, a pirate ship, the man in the moon, and a golden carousel. At night, there’s a bonfire and fireworks, and after the day’s events the two children are carried home by their parents. The next day in the dandelion field the magical carnival is gone, but a breeze comes by to lift all the dandelion seeds—and the children wish again. The illustrations are done in shimmering, summery colors and an impressionistic, almost pointillist, style. However, Jo, who is a light-haired child on the cover and in the first illustration or two, becomes a black-haired, African-British child later in the book. If this is a printing error, it’s an egregious one; if the producers changed their minds midstream about the ethnicity of Jo, they should have aimed for consistency. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7894-6326-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip. The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface. Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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