TINKLE, TINKLE, LITTLE STAR

A potty-time riff on the familiar rhyme.

Rhyming text urges the anthropomorphic Little Star not to “tinkle” until it reaches a potty at the book’s end. “Tinkle, tinkle, Little Star. / Just don’t tinkle in the car!” reads the opening spread, which depicts a worried Little Star strapped in a car seat while holding a juice box. But instead of letting this scene give way to subsequent ones in a logical narrative culminating in Little Star’s arrival at the potty after a long car trip, the ensuing spreads follow no logical sequence. First Little Star tries to “hold it on a train” and then on a plane, in a sandbox, at a puppet show, and so on, without any pit stops along the way. Do these scenes take place on different days? If they’re on a single day, the spreads bear no real narrative relationship to one another—they could just as well be read in a different order entirely, and many could be omitted, without consequence. Indeed, readers might wish some lines had been omitted, as the book seems to draw out the poor little celestial body’s suffering (though the cartoonish digital art in bright colors offers a decidedly light tone). The penultimate scene of Little Star grinning while sitting on a toilet brings relief to the character—and likely to readers as well—but it doesn’t make up for the lack of a satisfying story leading up to this ending.

Pooh-pooh.