Prompted, perhaps, by overcrowding in its home in the Yucatan, a cloudless sulphur butterfly journeys through the rainforest, over the Gulf of Mexico and across a helpful map of the U.S., passing ponies on Assateague Island and sheltering from a storm in New York’s Central Park, before arriving in southern Vermont, where it will mate and die. Its offspring are shown hatching on a cassia plant in the garden where they will spend their lives. The careful reader of the backmatter will realize that this is a one-way journey; unlike the monarch, these butterflies do not fly south, but this is not stated directly in the text. Realistic watercolor illustrations cross page boundaries and details escape into the margins and the area reserved for the evocative text, an imitation of the butterflies’ action as they erupt from their normal habitat and spread northward. Young readers will come away with a sense of wonder and admiration for the frail creature’s remarkable flight. (author’s note) (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 30, 2006
ISBN: 1-59078-082-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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
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
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