“Jealousy is a feeling that gets inside you. You invite it in, and suddenly . . . There’s a No-Good Dirty Nasty Mean Feather-Faced Chicken filling up your living room.” In her own way, Hubbard (Park Beat, 2001, etc.) helps children understand and deal with this powerful emotion. (Adults might benefit as well.) Once the Chicken is invited in, Envy (a Sneaky, Creepy, Sharp-Tongued Snake), Greed (a Rude Rat), and Rivalry (an angry Red Hornet) follow. Then you end up all by yourself with only the mean and nasty critters. How to deal with it? “YOU have a choice. You let them in . . . and YOU can KICK THEM OUT!” Suggestions on how to do so are general: “Pluck that chicken! Knot that snake!” Cautions and key words are in large, colored type; gouache and watercolor-pencil illustrations have the same energy, vibrant colors, and style of Hubbard’s best earlier work. Jealousy is depicted as a large chicken with a black head, white-lined eyes, a red, triangular beak, and black white-veined leaves as feathers. The children’s thoughts appear as black or white tear shapes with contrasting colored print. Lively design, fanciful figures, and playfulness with type effectively convey the message that you can triumph over jealousy and its friends, just not exactly how. One quibble: the verso cites written by Woodleigh Marx Hubbard with Madeleine Houston; indeed she gets to dedicate her contribution “to the teachers of metaphor.” Nowhere else is there credit or acknowledgement of what, or how much, role she played. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-23435-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2002
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
One of the watershed moments in African-American history—the defeat of James Braddock at the hands of Joe Louis—is here given an earnest picture-book treatment. Despite his lack of athletic ability, Sammy wants desperately to be a great boxer, like his hero, getting boxing lessons from his friend Ernie in exchange for help with schoolwork. However hard he tries, though, Sammy just can’t box, and his father comforts him, reminding him that he doesn’t need to box: Joe Louis has shown him that he “can be the champion at anything [he] want[s].” The high point of this offering is the big fight itself, everyone crowded around the radio in Mister Jake’s general store, the imagined fight scenes played out in soft-edged sepia frames. The main story, however, is so bent on providing Sammy and the reader with object lessons that all subtlety is lost, as Mister Jake, Sammy’s father, and even Ernie hammer home the message. Both text and oil-on-canvas-paper illustrations go for the obvious angle, making the effort as a whole worthy, but just a little too heavy-handed. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58430-161-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Lee & Low Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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