This menagerie offers picture-book lovers of all ages a glimpse into each creator’s style, personality and brand of humor.
Cause-related anthologies are challenging to do well, but this one (benefiting the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art) succeeds admirably—on multiple levels.
The investment of 13 popular illustrators allows Carle to present a portable gallery of animals and a marvelous array of approaches, media and layouts that even the youngest viewers can access. The only thing missing is ethnic diversity among the artists. Accompanying the assemblage are brief poems, captions or anecdotes conveying why these are favored choices. Peter Sís relays the Czech ritual of watching the Christmas Eve carp swimming in the bathtub and the tearful parade of neighborhood children releasing their dinners into the river; his flying fish transports three feline kings bearing gifts. Chris Raschka’s hand-lettered, existential musings are paired with his portrait of a lowly snail building a dazzling shell. Older children with a book background will have fun recognizing the work of familiar illustrators: Lane Smith’s textured, green pachyderm; Lucy Cousins’ heavily spotted leopard rendered in searing yellow; Erin Stead’s understated penguins. They will also enjoy Bad Kitty’s antics as he jealously breaks into Nick Bruel’s octopus story and the duo’s “shameless flattery” of the volume’s compiler. The book opens with Carle’s collaged string-bean–loving cat and concludes with photographs of his museum.
This menagerie offers picture-book lovers of all ages a glimpse into each creator’s style, personality and brand of humor. (biographies, photographs, websites) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9641-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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