Trite coaching with little net gain.
Patient Pig and Eager Eagle help each other up their games.
Author/entrepreneur Vaynerchuk casts animal VeeFriends from his line of NFT trading cards and reworks values explored in his business self-help guide Twelve and a Half (2021) for this flip book. Starting from one end of the book, readers meet Patient Pig, who eats breakfast (“the most important meal of the day,” she says) and so arrives at the playground after the big basketball game has started. Still, though she helps her team win by passing whenever anyone’s open, she never scores; later she joins Eager Eagle for some practice at taking the ball to the net. Readers can then begin the book from the other end. Eager Eagle skips breakfast to arrive first (and soon runs out of energy as the game goes on), but afterward he commends Patient Pig for her style of play and coaches her; meanwhile, she teaches him not to force his shots. “We’re a great team…when we meet in the middle,” they chorus, lounging head to head on the central spread. The dialogue is stilted (“I feel a lot better now! Your plans made this possible.” “Your excitement made me want to work harder”), while Lambe’s stubby-limbed, googly-eyed cartoon animals display a limited range of stylized expressions and postures. Young readers will certainly come away feeling instructed, though less than engaged.
Trite coaching with little net gain. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063320291
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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