Serious fun whether read or performed.
An old nursery rhyme expands with great silliness and literary sophistication.
Opening with the traditional six-line “Little Miss Muffet,” the narrative quickly becomes theatrical—literally. “The curtain opens on a lovely house,” say boxed stage directions, which also explain that the maids and gardener will play the chorus, changing costumes according to scene, and that “the narrator remains offstage.” Our protagonist’s given name is Patience, but she’s not your parents’ Miss Muffet—nor her parents’ Miss Muffet, not quite, rejecting their urges toward primness (mother) and entomology (father). She wants only to fiddle, so—after her mother steals her violin, and Webster the Aranea loucutus (talking spider) helps her find it—they leave home and meet an ever growing cast that includes Bo-Peep (another fiddler!), Old King Cole’s court, a rooster, some robbers, and a French poet. In stylized mixed media, Litchfield gives his tiny-footed, bulbous-nosed, elastic-necked white characters enormous speech bubbles for their…songs, perhaps? The text presents poems of myriad types—villanelle, Spanish sestet—which could be read or recited, or, with dedication, could be the script of a grand honking musical. Between the ever changing rhythms and rhyming structures and the alternating (sometimes interrupting!) voices in monologue, dialogue, chorus, and stage direction, reading aloud requires vigilance. Even the rhymes’ refinement level varies: “barbarian” with “vegetarian” in the same poem as “enemy” with “venomy.”
Serious fun whether read or performed. (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-547-90566-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
A luminous call to think about what is and to envision what might be.
In U.S. Poet Laureate Limón’s debut picture book, soaring images and lyrics invite contemplation of life’s wonders—on Earth and perhaps, tantalizingly, elsewhere.
“O second moon,” writes Limón, “we, too, are made / of water, // of vast and beckoning seas.” In visual responses to a poem that will be carried by NASA’s Europa Clipper, a probe scheduled for launch in October 2024 and designed to check Jupiter’s ice-covered ocean moon for possible signs of life, Sís offers flowing glimpses of earthly birds and whales, of heavenly bodies lit with benevolent smiles, and a small light-skinned space traveler flying between worlds in a vessel held aloft by a giant book. Following the undulations of the poet’s cadence, falling raindrops give way to shimmering splashes, then to a climactic fiery vision reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night before finishing with mirrored human figures made of stars. Visual images evocative of the tree of life presage what Límon writes in her afterword: that her poem is as much about “our own precious planet” as it is about what may lie in wait for us to discover on others. “We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, // of small invisible worlds, // of a need to call out through the dark.”
A luminous call to think about what is and to envision what might be. (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781324054009
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Some spry and inspired grave humor here, but weighed equally with some unimaginative efforts.
Cracked epitaphs from Lewis and Yolen.
This is a collection of 30 tombstone remembrances with an eye for the emphatically stamped exit visa. Ushered along by Timmins’ smoky, gothic artwork—and sometimes over-reliant upon it for effect—these last laughs take on a variety of moods. Sometimes they are gruesome, as with the newt, “so small, / so fine, / so squashed / beneath / the crossing / sign.” There are the macabre and the simply passing: “In his pond, / he peacefully soaked, / then, ever so quietly / croaked.” Goodbye frog—haplessly, hopelessly adrift in the olivy murk, a lily flower as witness and X's for eyes. When writers and artist are in balance, as they are here, or when the Canada goose gets cooked on the high-tension wires, the pages create a world unto themselves, beguiling and sad. It works with the decrepitude of the eel and the spookiness of the piranha’s undoing. But there are also times when the text end of the equation lets the side down. “Firefly’s Last Flight: Lights out.” Or the last of a wizened stag: “Win some. / Lose some. / Venison.” Or the swan’s last note: “A simple song. / It wasn’t long.” In these cases, brevity is not the soul of wit, but lost chances at poking a finger in the eye of the Reaper.
Some spry and inspired grave humor here, but weighed equally with some unimaginative efforts. (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: July 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-58089-260-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
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