Kimmel and Glass (Grizz!, 2000) reunite for a rousing original tale of battle between canal pirates and a crew of mail carriers. Modeling his rhyme on the old ballad beginning, “We were 40 miles from Albany / Forget it I never shall . . . ” Kimmel pits “Bill McGrew and his pirate crew / The Terror of Buffalo,” against intrepid Captain Flynn, who carries the fight from Mohawk into Lake Ontario, to the whirlpool beneath Niagara Falls. While the pirates go down to become watery ghosts wandering the Tonawanda shore, Flynn, with the aid of his trusty mule Ole Frank, tales his flatboat up the Falls to safety. In an afterword, Kimmel explains the origin of his story—a visit to a class that had been studying the Erie Canal, where he began to make up the idea of pirates—and the geographical liberties he took. Glass adds to the fun with wet-brushed scenes of rumpled boats and equally rumpled river men, the latter sporting floppy hats and heavy facial hair. Children will want to book return trips after this anything-but-uneventful voyage. (map) (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-8234-1657-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Categories: CHILDREN'S ENTERTAINMENT & SPORTS
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Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The iconic animator introduces young readers to each “happy place” in his life.
The tally begins with his childhood home in Marceline, Missouri, and climaxes with Disneyland (carefully designed to be “the happiest place on Earth”), but the account really centers on finding his true happy place, not on a map but in drawing. In sketching out his early flubs and later rocket to the top, the fictive narrator gives Ub Iwerks and other Disney studio workers a nod (leaving his labor disputes with them unmentioned) and squeezes in quick references to his animated films, from Steamboat Willie to Winnie the Pooh (sans Fantasia and Song of the South). Eliopoulos incorporates stills from the films into his cartoon illustrations and, characteristically for this series, depicts Disney as a caricature, trademark mustache in place on outsized head even in childhood years and child sized even as an adult. Human figures default to white, with occasional people of color in crowd scenes and (ahistorically) in the animation studio. One unidentified animator builds up the role-modeling with an observation that Walt and Mickey were really the same (“Both fearless; both resourceful”). An assertion toward the end—“So when do you stop being a child? When you stop dreaming”—muddles the overall follow-your-bliss message. A timeline to the EPCOT Center’s 1982 opening offers photos of the man with select associates, rodent and otherwise. An additional series entry, I Am Marie Curie, publishes simultaneously, featuring a gowned, toddler-sized version of the groundbreaking physicist accepting her two Nobel prizes.
Blandly laudatory. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2875-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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