Sly, silly fun with political and class-war overtones.
Common types of garden produce repeatedly thwart their upper-class fruit and veggie overlords in this droll translated classic, originally published in Italy in 1951 and selected by Hayao Miyazaki as one of his 50 favorite children’s books.
Hans Christian Andersen Award–winner Rodari’s Pinocchio-style picaresque features an intrepid young onion who’s bent on obeying his father’s instructions to go out into the world and study the ways of scoundrels. Repeatedly imprisoned (“But what else can you expect,” remarks the puckish narrator; “When you’re born an onion, you’re bound to come to tears”), Cipollino nonetheless makes fools of choleric nemesis Cavalier Tomato, insatiable gourmand Baron Sweet-Orange, and other aristocrats with help from sympathetic housemaid Strawberryette and other humble allies. Tolstikova’s watercolor-style illustrations, which are new for this first English edition, brighten nearly every spread with scenes of anthropomorphic figures topped by fruit or vegetable heads and joined by the occasional animatedly talking spider, mole, or other animal. Soldierly Ponderosa lemons march back and forth, and in one chapter the despicable Prince Lemon cruelly mistreats some cucumber horses, but in general the episodic tale has more satire than violence. In the end, a Republic is proclaimed, the prince winds up with his head in a dung pile, and a castle is turned into a playhouse. Just deserts all round.
Sly, silly fun with political and class-war overtones. (cast of characters) (Illustrated fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781592704163
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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