A good-natured friendship tale sure to encourage flexible thinking.
Accommodating BFFs return in Yoon’s kindhearted follow-up to Kat & Mouse: I Like Cheese! (2025).
Mouse and Kat are enjoying solo activities when Kat is struck by inspiration: “Let’s have a SLEEPOVER!” The pals’ personality differences are reflected in their packing choices. Mouse, a pragmatic blue rodent with red glasses, brings “a sleeping bag for sleeping, books for reading…and sheets to build a fort!” Kat, a lavender feline who sports a pink polka-dotted hair bow, embraces a more Dionysian approach: “I will need nachos for snacking, records for dancing…and costumes for playing dress-up!” Excitement runs high for their first sleepover, and the pair’s conflicts—noisy Kat interrupting Mouse’s reading; disagreements over their next activity—are low-stress and highly relatable. The result is an adorable sleepover etiquette guide in which friends quickly and expertly model the art of compromise to fuse their ideas of fun. Thick-lined digital artwork in solid secondary colors with clean backgrounds keeps the focus on the characters, while color-coded speech bubbles (green and bubble-gum pink) with minimal, bold text will suit emerging readers. This gently humorous second entry in the series continues to hit familiar beats for buddy animal stories, with obvious appeal to fans of Norm Feuti’s 2019 Let’s Have a Sleepover.
A good-natured friendship tale sure to encourage flexible thinking. (Graphic early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781547612451
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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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