With luck, this brave, creative foodie’s adventures are just beginning.
With this prequel to The Café at the Edge of the Woods (2024), Please provides an entertaining backstory for Glumfoot, the clever, green, pointy-eared front-of-house staff member at Rene’s restaurant.
As it happens, Glumfoot’s green-skinned father is also a chef of sorts, happily stirring up “booger broth” each morning. Their cave is filled with vines and things bulbous, squishy, and strange. And cookbooks. Glumfoot reads one intently, dreaming of “something sweeter.” When Rene opens her business nearby, Glumfoot breathes in the aroma, apparently transported. But a nearby ogre is also intrigued (“I heard humans taste good”), and Glumfoot realizes he must convince the ogre otherwise. “Humans taste like fungus toes! And nasty things up the nose,” he tries. The ruse backfires, only whetting the ogre’s appetite. With some quick thinking, Glumfoot eventually persuades the ogre that humans taste horrid and then redirects the hungry creature and its family to “a little cave where Father makes an oozing, booger broth.” Rene happens to open the door to her establishment just as Glumfoot arrives to raid the bins; she hires him on the spot. Burnt orange and snot-green predominate in Please’s palette, and the antic, animated quality of his linework in these edge-to-edge illustrations informs a cheerful, enchanted landscape of cave and forest.
With luck, this brave, creative foodie’s adventures are just beginning. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9780063345508
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Only for dedicated fans of the series.
When a kid gets the part of the ninja master in the school play, it finally seems to be the right time to tackle the closet monster.
“I spot my monster right away. / He’s practicing his ROAR. / He almost scares me half to death, / but I won’t be scared anymore!” The monster is a large, fluffy poison-green beast with blue hands and feet and face and a fluffy blue-and-green–striped tail. The kid employs a “bag of tricks” to try to catch the monster: in it are a giant wind-up shark, two cans of silly string, and an elaborate cage-and-robot trap. This last works, but with an unexpected result: the monster looks sad. Turns out he was only scaring the boy to wake him up so they could be friends. The monster greets the boy in the usual monster way: he “rips a massive FART!!” that smells like strawberries and lime, and then they go to the monster’s house to meet his parents and play. The final two spreads show the duo getting ready for bed, which is a rather anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a rambunctious tale. Elkerton’s bright illustrations have a TV-cartoon aesthetic, and his playful beast is never scary. The narrator is depicted with black eyes and hair and pale skin. Wallace’s limping verses are uninspired at best, and the scansion and meter are frequently off.
Only for dedicated fans of the series. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4894-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wandering effort, happy but pointless.
The perfect book for kids who love dragons and mild tacos.
Rubin’s story starts with an incantatory edge: “Hey, kid! Did you know that dragons love tacos? They love beef tacos and chicken tacos. They love really big gigantic tacos and tiny little baby tacos as well.” The playing field is set: dragons, tacos. As a pairing, they are fairly silly, and when the kicker comes in—that dragons hate spicy salsa, which ignites their inner fireworks—the silliness is sillier still. Second nature, after all, is for dragons to blow flames out their noses. So when the kid throws a taco party for the dragons, it seems a weak device that the clearly labeled “totally mild” salsa comes with spicy jalapenos in the fine print, prompting the dragons to burn down the house, resulting in a barn-raising at which more tacos are served. Harmless, but if there is a parable hidden in the dragon-taco tale, it is hidden in the unlit deep, and as a measure of lunacy, bridled or unbridled, it doesn’t make the leap into the outer reaches of imagination. Salmieri’s artwork is fitting, with a crabbed, ethereal line work reminiscent of Peter Sís, but the story does not offer it enough range.
A wandering effort, happy but pointless. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3680-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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