Blunt and easeful—like having an older sibling give you the scoop.
That perennial favorite, the mechanics of excretion, is well and alimentarily served by this app from Hayes and Vaughan.
With its youthful, rhyming voice-over—“Speaking of food, that’s where it starts— / poop, I mean (and also farts)”—it gives the topic frank fun that conveys the naturalness of the process without stripping away its comic strangeness. The actors here are a boy and his dog (and of course the poops), who usher users stem to stern from mouthful to flush, stopping at every station along the way: esophagus, belly, intestine, toilet, cesspools and sewage lines. The body parts are situated and identified but not explored in any depth. Each page—there are 19—has one or more opportunities for engagement, sometimes opening up another page for greater explication, sometimes just allowing the dog to bark or the intestine to rumble; all is movement, as it were. One page is devoted to a gallery of poop shapes and another to the passing of gas—the accompanying sound effects are a hoot (flarp! squeep! pwip!). Tips (don’t play with poop, wash your hands) and trivia (herring communicate via flatulence, elephants poop 300 pounds a day) close out the proceedings.
Blunt and easeful—like having an older sibling give you the scoop. (iPad informational app. 4-8)Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pinwheel Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
Turkey’s in the “kind of trouble where it’s almost Thanksgiving...and you’re the main course.” Accordingly, Turkey tries on disguise after disguise, from horse to cow to pig to sheep, at each iteration being told that he looks nothing like the animal he’s trying to mimic (which is quite true, as Harper’s quirky watercolors make crystal clear). He desperately squeezes a red rubber glove onto his head to pass as a rooster, only to overhear the farmer suggest a poultry plan B when he’s unable to turn up the turkey. Turkey’s horrified expression as he stands among the peppers and tomatoes—in November? Chalk it up to artistic license—is priceless, but his surroundings give him an idea. Good fun, but it may lead to a vegetarian table or two. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5529-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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