There’s an elegiac quality to this gentle tale that takes place in a small town in Iowa on a Thursday afternoon in August of 1916. Tom Elson looks into the eyes of a mysterious animal, the farivox, and decides that he wants this animal more than he’s ever wanted anything. The farivox is said to be a rare animal, possibly extinct, that can talk in a human like voice. “Hurry!” Tom is sure he hears the farivox say, as he runs off to get the money to buy him. But Tom never sees the farivox again, for it is gone, just as if it had “dried up and been blown away by the hot August wind, like dust on one of Iowa’s long dirt roads.” Framed by stories of the demise of the passenger pigeon and other vanished species, the story holds out the hope that in some remote corner animals thought to be lost may linger on, and that someone, someday, may hear one of them whisper “Hurry.” McCully’s (Monk Camps Out, p. 480) luminous watercolors provide a perfect complement to this well-told tale that despite, or perhaps partly because of, its old-fashioned ambience and carefully paced telling, conveys the irrevocability of loss and gives added urgency to the meaning of “hurry.” (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-201579-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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As atmospheric as its companion, Twilight Comes Twice, this tone poem pairs poetically intense writing with luminescent oils featuring widely spaced houses, open lawns, and clumps of autumnal trees, all lit by a huge full moon. Fletcher tracks that moon’s nocturnal path in language rich in metaphor: “With silent slippers / it climbs the night stairs,” “staining earth and sky with a ghostly glow,” lighting up a child’s bedroom, the wings of a small plane, moonflowers, and, ranging further afield, harbor waves and the shells of turtle hatchlings on a beach. Using creamy brushwork and subtly muted colors, Kiesler depicts each landscape, each night creature from Luna moths to a sleepless child and her cat, as well as the great moon sweeping across star-flecked skies, from varied but never vertiginous angles. Closing with moonset, as dawn illuminates the world with a different kind of light, this makes peaceful reading either in season, or on any moonlit night. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-16451-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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A repressive teacher almost ruins second grade for a prodigy in this amusing, if overwritten, tale. Having shown a fascination with great buildings since constructing a model of the Leaning Tower of Pisa from used diapers at age two, Iggy sinks into boredom after Miss Greer announces, throwing an armload of histories and craft projects into the trash, that architecture will be a taboo subject in her class. Happily, she changes her views when the collapse of a footbridge leaves the picnicking class stranded on an island, whereupon Iggy enlists his mates to build a suspension bridge from string, rulers and fruit roll-ups. Familiar buildings and other structures, made with unusual materials or, on the closing pages, drawn on graph paper, decorate Roberts’s faintly retro cartoon illustrations. They add an audience-broadening element of sophistication—as would Beaty’s decision to cast the text into verse, if it did not result in such lines as “After twelve long days / that passed in a haze / of reading, writing and arithmetic, / Miss Greer took the class / to Blue River Pass / for a hike and an old-fashioned picnic.” Another John Lithgow she is not, nor is Iggy another Remarkable Farkle McBride (2000), but it’s always salutary to see young talent vindicated. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8109-1106-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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