Puns and foolery pitched just right for newly independent readers.
Zemke provides more farmyard huggermugger (George Shannon’s Wise Acres, 2004) to illustrate Degman’s versified tale of animals trying to substitute at sunrise for an absent rooster.
Deciding that he needs a week at the beach to catch up on his sleep, Rooster enlists fellow livestock to crow each morning to wake Farmer McPeeper while he’s gone. But despite the best efforts of Sheep (“Her cock-a-doodle baaaaaaaa / didn’t travel too faaa. / In fact, she made barely a peep”), Cow (“udder disaster!”) and the rest, McPeeper sleeps on. Looking properly popeyed and panicky in the cartoon scenes, the other animals welcome Rooster back at last—only to learn that he’s caught a cold and can barely wheeze. As in her prizewinning light verse for 1 Zany Zoo (illustrated by Colin Jack, 2010), the author displays a gift for rhymes and language that is clever rather than forced. She also skips the obvious (trite) solution of a general hullabaloo and just has Rooster leave a whispered “cock-a-doodle-doo” on McPeeper’s bedside phone—a technology assist that displays pleasing ingenuity. Farmer McPeeper wakes up, feeling like he’s slept for a week…which he has.
Puns and foolery pitched just right for newly independent readers. (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939547-07-1
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Creston
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
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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