An imagination well worth walking through.
As Mr. Noah converts the Ark into a home after making landfall, Mrs. Noah finds a place to create a new garden.
Gazing at a blue, stony landscape, Mrs. Noah misses her home’s garden. She looks around the land and finds a place where some trees had hung on through the flood. Her children, whose skin tones vary between Mrs. Noah’s dark brown skin and Mr. Noah’s pale skin, help her to clear space and build stone walls and terraces. Some mythical creatures help too. Mrs. Noah plants seeds from her pockets and “trees, shrubs, bushes and bulbs” that were carried on the Ark. She works on the garden all day long and does homemaking chores at night (“Curtains. At last,” Mr. Noah thinks). As she continues shaping the garden and “the earth blossom[s] under her touch,” the rains fall gently, and the pictures show her belly growing. On Midsummer’s Eve, Mrs. Noah sleeps in the garden, and the next morning, the children find a world in blossom, loud with bird song and buzzing bees. The text is thick with lush, lovely description and symbolic imagery of life and regeneration. With densely colored, busy collage illustrations, this distinctive story evokes a combination of the fantastical, the religious (both Biblical and pagan), the ancient, the modern, and the timeless. A few surprising details (like the use of a sewing machine) call unnecessary attention to themselves, but these quirks are easily forgiven.
An imagination well worth walking through. (Picture book. 4-9)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-91095-946-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Otter-Barry
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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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