A child gets past his fear of both a bully and a teacher in this triumphant playground memoir, to which Davis contributes a set of typically over-the-top illustrations featuring crowds of broad-faced, pop-eyed, stubby-limbed figures with exaggerated hair and expressions. What with the evil attentions of hulking, Red Hots–candy-sucking Richard Newton and the heavy academics laid on by Mrs. Mousetrap, third grade is shaping up to be ugly. Until recess that is, when yo-yo salesman Ramon shows up to demonstrate a set of spectacular tricks and to promise a “gold yo-yo just like his, with realistic diamonds on each side” to any child who can duplicate them. Immediately seeing that Richard Newton is “a yo-yo no-go, a yo-yo goo-goo,” the young narrator determines to buckle down, with yo-yo and spelling book both. In the end, his determination pays off with a first-place ribbon in class, a “diamond-studded” yo-yo of his very own and a general cheer from his toothily grinning schoolmates. “I am a true yo-yo man,” he concludes, “And I can spell.” Even without the fantasy elements that underpin Pinkwater and Davis’s previous collaboration, Picture of Morty & Ray (2003), this will be a crowd pleaser. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-055502-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
Categories: CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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Left behind when the space bus departs, a child discovers that the moon isn’t as lifeless as it looks.
While the rest of the space-suited class follows the teacher like ducklings, one laggard carrying crayons and a sketchbook sits down to draw our home planet floating overhead, falls asleep, and wakes to see the bus zooming off. The bright yellow bus, the gaggle of playful field-trippers, and even the dull gray boulders strewn over the equally dull gray lunar surface have a rounded solidity suggestive of Plasticine models in Hare’s wordless but cinematic scenes…as do the rubbery, one-eyed, dull gray creatures (think: those stress-busting dolls with ears that pop out when squeezed) that emerge from the regolith. The mutual shock lasts but a moment before the lunarians eagerly grab the proffered crayons to brighten the bland gray setting with silly designs. The creatures dive into the dust when the bus swoops back down but pop up to exchange goodbye waves with the errant child, who turns out to be an olive-skinned kid with a mop of brown hair last seen drawing one of their new friends with the one crayon—gray, of course—left in the box. Body language is expressive enough in this debut outing to make a verbal narrative superfluous.
A close encounter of the best kind. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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BOOK REVIEW
When Rabbit’s unbridled mania for collecting carrots leaves him unable to sleep in his cozy burrow, other animals offer to put him up.
But to Rabbit, their homes are just more storage space for carrots: Tortoise’s overstuffed shell cracks open; the branch breaks beneath Bird’s nest; Squirrel’s tree trunk topples over; and Beaver’s bulging lodge collapses at the first rainstorm. Impelled by guilt and the epiphany that “carrots weren’t for collecting—they were for SHARING!” Rabbit invites his newly homeless friends into his intact, and inexplicably now-roomy, burrow for a crunchy banquet. This could be read (with some effort) as a lightly humorous fable with a happy ending, and Hudson’s depictions of carrot-strewn natural scenes, of Rabbit as a plush bunny, and of the other animals as, at worst, mildly out of sorts support that take. Still, the insistent way Rabbit keeps forcing himself on his friends and the magnitude of the successive disasters may leave even less-reflective readers disturbed. Moreover, as Rabbit is never seen actually eating a carrot, his stockpiling looks a lot like the sort of compulsive hoarding that, in humans, is regarded as a mental illness.
Superficially appealing; much less so upon closer examination. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62370-638-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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