MY KITE IS STUCK!

Loud and confident Big Duck, her clever brother, Little Duck, and their agreeable purple friend, Porcupine, return in this early reader with three humorous but uneven adventures.

As in series opener Duck, Duck, Porcupine (2016), Yoon uses word recognition, repetition, and visual storytelling to highlight these three friends’ adventures. The simple digital art, bold, with thick black outlines and vivid colors, expertly uses facial expressions and body language to support the text. The text is presented entirely in the form of dialogue bubbles in graphic-novel style. In the first adventure, “My Kite Is Stuck!” observant Little Duck with his blue baseball cap quietly saves the day when their toys are stuck up a tree. And he does it again in the third story, when Big Duck and Porcupine work together to set up the “Best Lemonade Stand” but hilariously forget one (very!) essential item. However, the middle adventure, “A New Friend,” in which this trio tries to make friends with different “bugs” (a bumblebee and a spider), fails to rise to the level of effectiveness and humor of the other two adventures. Reserved Little Duck does not talk throughout the book; but in a few special panels, he breaks the frame, looking out at the audience and making eye contact with readers.

Fans of this series will enjoy this trio of friends in their second, mostly funny, outing.