A morality tale whose moral may go missing.
Life is a bowl of cherries when you are voted the ugliest animal in the world—until next year’s contest.
For years, Blob the fish has ascended from his 3,000-foot-deep Pacific home, donned a disguise so as not to make passers-by faint, and attended the world’s-ugliest-animal contest. He has captured second and third but never the prize. This year would be different. There might be a bald uakari monkey, a naked mole rat, an aye-aye lemur, a proboscis monkey, an axolotl, a Vietnamese leaf-nosed bat in the running—all as repulsive as can be under the hand of the extremely artful Tallec—but Blob walks away with the sash and crown for his slimy, graceless, sheepish, pitiful self. He becomes the darling of the animal world and lives the high life for a year, rubbing shoulders with celebrities and becoming spoiled rotten and then depressed as his year approaches its end. He must hand his crown to, gulp, a forked-tailed caterpillar, and there is nowhere to go but down—3,000 feet down, back home, where, “like any traveler who returns home, Blob has many stories to tell. Sometimes, the bright lights and sparkling diamonds he describes seem far from beautiful.” The change is abrupt and awfully subtle—readers who blink may miss it, though alert caregivers can use it as a springboard for conversation.
A morality tale whose moral may go missing. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59270-207-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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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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
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