It’s a cow’s life, until Cappuccina gets it in her head that town looks a lot more fun than her pasture, in this candied grass-is-greener tale. Cappuccina is a substantial Holstein who lives at Farmer Fiori’s farm. Her hayfield has a view to a hilltop town, where she imagines people having much merriment. Occasionally, she’d even like to be human. When a storm results in a break in her fence, she makes a dash for the bright lights. But when she tries to deck herself out as a human—Cappuccina’s idea of humanness is going shopping, which is perhaps the more subversive lesson in this story—she finds the shoes don’t fit her hooves, the hat won’t settle on her horns, and the dress won’t drape properly over her tail. A hairdresser comes to the rescue with a pretty bow tie for her afterpart, and then it dawns on Cappuccina: “She really was just perfect as herself.” She returns to her pasture, where Farmer Fiori remarks, “Your life is so peaceful. . . . Sometimes I wish I were a cow,” which sets things up for the sequel. A story of flouncy cuteness, both in the text (“ ‘I will get a pretty dress to wear.’ Tossing her head in a friendly way, she stepped over to the dressmaker’s”) and in the artwork, all tropical colors and enough enormous grins on each page to make your teeth ache. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55074-807-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
The wriggly narrator of Diary of a Worm (2003) puts in occasional appearances, but it’s his arachnid buddy who takes center stage here, with terse, tongue-in-cheek comments on his likes (his close friend Fly, Charlotte’s Web), his dislikes (vacuums, people with big feet), nervous encounters with a huge Daddy Longlegs, his extended family—which includes a Grandpa more than willing to share hard-won wisdom (The secret to a long, happy life: “Never fall asleep in a shoe.”)—and mishaps both at spider school and on the human playground. Bliss endows his garden-dwellers with faces and the odd hat or other accessory, and creates cozy webs or burrows colorfully decorated with corks, scraps, plastic toys and other human detritus. Spider closes with the notion that we could all get along, “just like me and Fly,” if we but got to know one another. Once again, brilliantly hilarious. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000153-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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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