Another hilarious outing for the curious cockroach—and readers with strong stomachs.
Perspective determines perception in this comic clash of human and roach viewpoints.
Hutchings’ narrator, the confident cockroach introduced in Your Birthday Was the Best! (2022), enthusiastically celebrates a visit to “your” school (“you” being a light-skinned child with short blond hair). Self-assured but supremely un-self-aware, the roach is certain that you would be sad to realize you forgot to bring them along for show and tell, so the crawlie climbs aboard your backpack—with a crowd of family. After they covertly enjoy some fun classroom activities, your big presentation arrives, so the ebullient insect lets loose by dancing on your teacher’s head. The ensuing panic is cited as evidence of this performance’s success. During a lunchtime game of hide-and-seek, the vermin crawl into your teacher’s lunchbox, precipitating her “little rest” (i.e., dead faint). Later, the narrator wants to join you and draw a picture, but the crayons are too heavy to hold, so they eat several colors instead—and then excrete a pile of rainbow pellets. (Kids, don’t try this at home.) The bug’s final “triumph” is their portrait of you, rendered in the excreted “rainbow paint," which sends the kids screaming from the room but convinces the narrator that such art moves everyone to tears. Sala again provides perfect illustrations: a cheerful elementary classroom with diverse students, a perky individual little face for every roach, and realistic details to reward the inevitable rereading. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Another hilarious outing for the curious cockroach—and readers with strong stomachs. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 9, 2023
ISBN: 9780735271647
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
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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