A sweet, short-sentenced book made for young dog lovers seeking life advice.
Adorable photographs and clever cartoons combine in this book of life advice from MacDonald and his dog.
A brief introduction, signed by MacDonald and his spouse, Patti, explains that the two humans have learned a lot from Charlie, their Cavalier King Charles spaniel. MacDonald and Charlie offer sage words of wisdom, geared toward young readers but equally applicable to adults. Each two-page spread features large text with themes like, “Be curious,” accompanied by an original comic illustration by Bucella and followed by a photo of Charlie and his insight (“You can never know too much”). Some of the pages go together well: Advice to look for treats includes an image of Charlie standing on hind legs at the vet, requesting an extra biscuit. Other spreads use contrasting themes and images. The short, plain text includes accessible vocabulary (featuring challenges like knowledge and understanding), making this a good choice for emergent readers. Bucella’s comedic illustrations enhance the text, and additional “Far Side”–style comics appear as bonus extras on the endpapers. But the real star is Charlie, who looks soft and snuggly in his photos. Most of the photographs of Charlie are edited to eliminate the original context and placed on a minimalist, illustrated background; the most successful images are those that include more detail.
A sweet, short-sentenced book made for young dog lovers seeking life advice.Pub Date: March 23, 2023
ISBN: 9798985816235
Page Count: 48
Publisher: del Mar Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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