An ill-mannered shrew learns a valuable lesson. The story is told in five “acts,” bracketed (and interrupted) by a tart grandmother shrew, who tells the tale to her hungry grandson. Under a big spruce tree on the West Meadow lives a huge burrow-ful of shrews, the most temperamental of whom is surely little Lola. “Shrews are not known for being nice, but Lola really took the cake.” Lola meets her match in visiting cousin Lester; they scream at each other until both lose their voices. At school, they fight about activities and at home about beds and food. The exhausted Lola has an epiphany: When she and Lester fight, both lose. A compromise leads to harmony, in sleeping arrangements and at the dinner table. Smath’s busy, impish illustrations—in watercolor accented with pen-and-ink—are a good match for Weiss’s substantial narrative, told mostly in dialogue. There are chuckles on every page—particularly in the grandmother’s narrative asides, which hint at her identity (“Screaming is relaxing”)—and readers won’t need to know Shakespeare to enjoy this yarn. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8109-4066-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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
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
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