Well designed and produced, but no swan.
A verdant garden of options and interactive features is smothered by bland art and woeful versification.
Stumbling and forcibly rhymed lines like “He almost ran away, he didn’t want them all to see / How different he was from them, not graceful and lovely,” tell the familiar tale. A “big, fat and gray” hatchling (actually pure yellow when first seen, later acquiring gray blotches) wanders through grassy settings and tidy interiors festooned with flowers, mushrooms, pet and woodland animals, household and other items—most of which will hop, paddle, sway, chuckle, buzz, clatter or otherwise respond to touches—to his eventual epiphany. Menus accessible from the title page and every subsequent screen allow the verses to be displayed or removed at will, an audio narration or a self-recorded one to run as an alternative to silent reading, quick skipping via a strip of thumbnail page images and a full auto option for passive or group viewing. A completist-pleasing “Tips” button identifies all of the touchable features in a scene with tiny blue hands. The illustrator, the writer and Hans Christian Andersen go uncredited, which is for the best.
Well designed and produced, but no swan. (iPad storybook app. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: TabTale
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Give this child’s-eye view of a day at the beach with an attentive father high marks for coziness: “When your ball blows across the sand and into the ocean and starts to drift away, your daddy could say, Didn’t I tell you not to play too close to the waves? But he doesn’t. He wades out into the cold water. And he brings your ball back to the beach and plays roll and catch with you.” Alley depicts a moppet and her relaxed-looking dad (to all appearances a single parent) in informally drawn beach and domestic settings: playing together, snuggling up on the sofa and finally hugging each other goodnight. The third-person voice is a bit distancing, but it makes the togetherness less treacly, and Dad’s mix of love and competence is less insulting, to parents and children both, than Douglas Wood’s What Dads Can’t Do (2000), illus by Doug Cushman. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-00361-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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