Bear in particular takes a star turn in the loving trio’s latest welcome outing.
The splendid friends boogie down.
Hearing Bear’s wish to fly—“So I could swoop and glide / and feel the wind in my fur”—hyperactive Fox rushes into view with a cape and goggles. But spinning about to Fox’s instructions only leaves Bear feeling woozy. Fox’s next idea involves a sled ride...which also doesn’t end well. What to do? A portable record player (younger readers may need a bit of parental explanation here) turns out to be all Bear really needs to “swoop and glide”: “It’s like flying, but with your / feet on the ground. Mostly.” Both at the start and later on, big, fantastically shaggy Bear really cuts the rug in Bloom’s elementally simple pastels, demonstrating solo dance moves and poses that Dancing with the Stars entrants can only dream of and finally sweeping Goose and Fox up in a delirious collective whirl. Abrupt transitions from indoor dancing to outdoor sledding and back, plus jacket flaps that partially obscure the charming figures on the endpapers, are distracting but minor hitches in a joyful invitation to move to the music, any music.
Bear in particular takes a star turn in the loving trio’s latest welcome outing. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62979-442-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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