In a second solo outing as opaque as The Little Giant (2004), a pack rat with a huge collection of curiosities starts over after momentarily losing focus. Depicted as a small, ski-nosed rodent with sunken shoulders, Pius Pelosi slouches through city and country picking up oddly shaped roots and leaves, lost items and interesting bric-a-brac, until he’s filled all the shelves in a mammoth display hall. But after visitors complain that the collection’s oldest item, a plain pebble, is too ordinary, he throws it out, suddenly sinks into depression and gives everything away. Then one day he finds another pebble, and that rekindles his urge to collect. Readers might enjoy poring over the dozens of often inscrutable items on Pius’s shelves in the softly colored cartoons, but his emotional ups and downs seem puzzlingly arbitrary—particularly next to those of the notable young collectors in Marthe Jocelyn’s Hannah’s Collections (2000), Carey Armstrong-Ellis’s Prudy’s Problem and How She Solved It (2002), or, on a more rarefied but still comprehensible plane, Quint Buchholz’s Collector of Moments (1999). (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-374-36343-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
Rylant (Henry and Mudge and the Sneaky Crackers, 1998, etc.) slips into a sentimental mode for this latest outing of the boy and his dog, as she sends Mudge and Henry and his parents off on a camping trip. Each character is attended to, each personality sketched in a few brief words: Henry's mother is the camping veteran with outdoor savvy; Henry's father doesn't know a tent stake from a marshmallow fork, but he's got a guitar for campfire entertainment; and the principals are their usual ready-for-fun selves. There are sappy moments, e.g., after an evening of star- gazing, Rylant sends the family off to bed with: ``Everyone slept safe and sound and there were no bears, no scares. Just the clean smell of trees . . . and wonderful green dreams.'' With its nice tempo, the story is as toasty as its campfire and swaddled in Stevenson's trusty artwork. (Fiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-689-81175-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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