It may be interchangeable with its three predecessors, but it still provides peaceful, gently unsettling visions for young...
Imagine a new gallery of technically adroit paintings featuring M.C. Escher–like shifts in images and perspective: Gonsalves’ fourth, and first solo, pictorial outing.
The artist has one main idea, and from Imagine a Night (2003) on, he’s worked it thoroughly. Each scene begins at one edge with a realistic outdoor or interior view containing one or two elements that shift in either gradual or sudden transitions as the eye moves across. Here, clouds become mountains or whole continents, for instance, fallen autumn leaves are transformed to swirls of monarch butterflies, a row of open books becomes a row of doorways, and a high waterfall is a troupe of lithe Martha Graham–style dancers by the time it reaches the bottom. He tucks human figures of diverse ages (almost all Caucasian), including several self-portraits, into the paintings. Here, for a new wrinkle, he provides his own one-sentence captions, written in the same vein as Sarah Thomson’s lyrical comments in previous outings: “imagine a world… / …where the beauty that has fallen / can find a way to fly.”
It may be interchangeable with its three predecessors, but it still provides peaceful, gently unsettling visions for young dreamers. (Picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-4973-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
“Little boy blue / come blow your tuba. / The sheep are in Venice, / and the cow’s in Aruba.” Pairing frenetic and garishly colored art to familiar rhymes in “more modern, more fresh, and well…more Goosian” versions, Seibold stakes out Stinky Cheese Man territory to introduce “Jack and Jill / and a pickle named Bill,” the Old Woman Who Lived in a Sneaker (“She had a great big stereo speaker”), Peter Pumpkin Pickle Pepper and about two dozen more “re-nurseried” figures. Against patterned or spray-painted backgrounds, an entire page of umbrella-carrying raindrops float down, a bunch of mice run up (“the clock struck one; / the rest had fun”), cats fiddle for Old King Coal and others, Jack B. Nimble makes a lifelong career out of demonstrating his one trick and a closing rendition of the counting rhyme “One, Two, I Lost My Shoe” is transformed into a clever reprise as many of the characters return to take final bows. Sparkles on the cover; chuckles (despite some lame rhyming) throughout. (Fractured nursery rhymes. 7-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8118-6882-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When budgets or problems aren’t quite right for the likes of Spider-Man or the Dark Knight, here’s a reasonably priced...
From Blunder Woman to Stuporman, this gallery of underemployed B-list superheroes is up for any task.
Got rats and mice? Call on the (inch-high) Verminator! Supernatural foes will flee from the garlic foam wielded by Muffy the Vampire Sprayer. Afflicted by gangsters? “When racketeers insist on quiet / and it’s not wise to start a riot, / send the Baby, send the Baby.” Furthermore, “And if those cries don’t make them hyper, / Weapon Two is in the diaper.” Along with having distinct individual powers and abilities, several of these eager job seekers combine to offer enhanced services. Armored Sir Knightly and The Masked Man, both aging veterans, can team up to entertain at children’s parties, for instance, and Kelly (ejected from the Green Lantern Corps for wearing a heterodox shade of green) will join silk-spinner Caterpillar to design stylish new costumes for “Trendy Defenders.” Using a free range of page designs from sequential panels to full-spread scenes, Jones reflects both the changing rhythms and the overall buoyancy of Singer’s rhymes with simply drawn, brightly colored cartoon views of each S.E.A. member in action.
When budgets or problems aren’t quite right for the likes of Spider-Man or the Dark Knight, here’s a reasonably priced alternative. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)Pub Date: July 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-43559-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
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