History in highly congenial style—wit sizzles in both text and illustration—marks this entry in the Ready-to-Read series a winner. As the book, subtitled ``The Story of the California Gold Rush,'' opens, San Francisco is still a sleepy little town, rife with rumors of gold that soon gain legs. In 1848, while helping build a sawmill in the hills east of the city, carpenter James Marshall stumbles upon what proves to be a gold nugget. Soon the news filters eastward, luring some to board ships and others to join wagon trains, all of them headed for the goldfields of California. Krensky (see review, above) handles the era of the Forty- Niners from beginning to end; his account bristles with solid facts presented with an eye for the wry. The fun extends to pictures, lavish in number; that miners lived in places like Bedbug or Grizzly Flats makes for good copy, but seeing what they did to dress up their beards for Sundays makes the whole thing laugh-out-loud funny. Beginning readers will cherish this brand of history. (maps) (Nonfiction. 6-9)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-689-80804-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales.
The Mouse and the Motorcycle (1965) upgrades to The Mice and the Rolls-Royce.
In Windsor Castle there sits a “dollhouse like no other,” replete with working plumbing, electricity, and even a full library of real, tiny books. Called Queen Mary’s Dollhouse, it also plays host to the Whiskers family, a clan of mice that has maintained the house for generations. Henry Whiskers and his cousin Jeremy get up to the usual high jinks young mice get up to, but when Henry’s little sister Isabel goes missing at the same time that the humans decide to clean the house up, the usually bookish big brother goes on the adventure of his life. Now Henry is driving cars, avoiding cats, escaping rats, and all before the upcoming mouse Masquerade. Like an extended version of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice (1904), Priebe keeps this short chapter book constantly moving, with Duncan’s peppy art a cute capper. Oddly, the dollhouse itself plays only the smallest of roles in this story, and no factual information on the real Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House is included at the tale’s end (an opportunity lost).
Innocuous adventuring on the smallest of scales. (Fantasy. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6575-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Mary, Remember, and Bartholomew Allerton were among the youngest on the Mayflower's first voyage; the words here tell how, with the other newcomers, they suffer tremendous losses but gradually come to view Plymouth as home. Meanwhile, the author's paintings expand considerably on the text with a fanciful map of the journey, a cutaway view of the ship, and crowd scenes of planting, harvest, and thanksgiving. The children, introduced in the first paragraph, don't appear in the illustrations, and are not the focus of any picture, until well into the book. The ongoing disparity between text and art is unsettling; moreover, the text is often clumsy: After the death of Mary—last of the original group—the narrative leaps back to a confusing, incomplete explanation of the Pilgrims' origins. The panoramic watercolors are attractive, with expertly composed, cinematic scenes, but the text, pursuing its separate agenda, regrettably never catches up. (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-742643-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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