Appealing art and, occasionally, wordplay but overall an incoherent jumble.
Surprises galore lurk beneath small flaps and reverse folds in shops and shopping bags, at a salon, a museum, and the circus.
Readers following a blond, white lad’s stroll through town are in for a surreal experience. Each stop features heavy-handed jokes or inscrutable revelations cued by leading questions: “And what is that under the baker’s hat?” A brioche, it turns out, along with a rolling pin and a hard-to-parse comment that “He’s always prepared!” (For what?) Some transformations involve wordplay. Lift a salon poster labeled “Fetching!” and there’s a dog, labeled “Fetch!” The dark-skinned cave woman with an Afro who holds the “First rock tool” in a glass case is likewise transformed into the “First rock star.” (Really?) But how does the dinosaur tie beneath a museum guard’s coat make him a “kindred spirit” to the thief who has snatched a Ming vase revealed behind the sarcophagus across the gutter? Who are the “Eliott” and “Elisa” who feature in a tattoo on an elephant (“An elephant never forgets eternal love!”) and then “wish you well” at the end? The tidy, very simply drawn shops and other settings, peopled with a mix of pink- and brown-skinned figures, are easy on the eye—but good luck to anyone trying to draw sense out of the scenarios.
Appealing art and, occasionally, wordplay but overall an incoherent jumble. (Pop-up picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6157-0
Page Count: 22
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be...
In his third beginning reader about Otto the robot, Milgrim (See Otto, 2002, etc.) introduces another new friend for Otto, a little mouse named Pip.
The simple plot involves a large balloon that Otto kindly shares with Pip after the mouse has a rather funny pointing attack. (Pip seems to be in that I-point-and-I-want-it phase common with one-year-olds.) The big purple balloon is large enough to carry Pip up and away over the clouds, until Pip runs into Zee the bee. (“Oops, there goes Pip.”) Otto flies a plane up to rescue Pip (“Hurry, Otto, Hurry”), but they crash (and splash) in front of some hippos with another big balloon, and the story ends as it begins, with a droll “See Pip point.” Milgrim again succeeds in the difficult challenge of creating a real, funny story with just a few simple words. His illustrations utilize lots of motion and basic geometric shapes with heavy black outlines, all against pastel backgrounds with text set in an extra-large typeface.
Emergent readers will like the humor in little Pip’s pointed requests, and more engaging adventures for Otto and Pip will be welcome additions to the limited selection of funny stories for children just beginning to read. (Easy reader. 5-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85116-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina...
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up.
Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields.
Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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