Fun for a first read but unlikely to have children calling for another.
An answer to the classic first-day-of-school question is unspooled in tall-tale fashion by the white boy with the black unruly hair in the too-small suit first met in I Didn’t Do My Homework Because… (2014).
His tall, long-nosed teacher, also white, asks the question, and the story starts on a beach where the boy and his dachshund find a treasure map. Immediately, a magpie steals the map, and the chase begins: from a pirate ship to an adventure with a giant squid, from a submarine to a movie set where an actress (with a long nose) in medieval dress enables the boy to retrieve the map. There’s a hot air balloon trip, an unexpected rescue by his uncle’s flying machine, and then a drop-off on an island where that magpie flies off with the map again, forcing the boy to continue his travels to the Taj Mahal, the Great Wall of China, and a snowy country populated by yetis. Finally, the boy and the dog find the treasure (some rather tame snorkeling masks) on the original beach. They discover underwater beauty but miss a real treasure chest. They also miss the joke that readers won’t: the teacher has engineered the whole adventure! The small trim, terse, first-person narrative, and detailed, cartoonlike pen-and–colored ink drawings will have individual readers chortling, at least the first time around.
Fun for a first read but unlikely to have children calling for another. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4521-4483-2
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated...
The master of the manic patterned tale offers a newly buffed version of his first published book, with appropriately gloppy new illustrations.
Like the previous four iterations (orig. 1979; revised 2004, 2006, 2009), the plot remains intact through minor changes in wording: Each time young Jule Ann ventures outside in clean clothes, a nefarious mud puddle leaps out of a tree or off the roof to get her “completely all over muddy” and necessitate a vigorous parental scrubbing. Petricic gives the amorphous mud monster a particularly tarry look and texture in his scribbly, high-energy cartoon scenes. It's a formidable opponent, but the two bars of smelly soap that the resourceful child at last chucks at her attacker splatter it over the page and send it sputtering into permanent retreat.
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated sound effects. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-427-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
There are many parallel legends – the seal women, for example, with their strange sad longings – but none is more direct than this American Indian story of a girl who is carried away in a horses’ stampede…to ride thenceforth by the side of a beautiful stallion who leads the wild horses. The girl had always loved horses, and seemed to understand them “in a special way”; a year after her disappearance her people find her riding beside the stallion, calf in tow, and take her home despite his strong resistance. But she is unhappy and returns to the stallion; after that, a beautiful mare is seen riding always beside him. Goble tells the story soberly, allowing it to settle, to find its own level. The illustrations are in the familiar striking Goble style, but softened out here and there with masses of flowers and foliage – suitable perhaps for the switch in subject matter from war to love, but we miss the spanking clean design of Custer’s Last Battle and The Fetterman Fight. 6-7
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0689845049
Page Count: -
Publisher: Bradbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1978
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