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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... McMinnville Public Library | Ahlberg | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | AHLBERG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | TALES AHLBERG | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
The team behind The Runaway Dinner reverses direction in this clever pastiche of fairy tales in which everyone lives happily ever . . . before. Full color.
Author Notes
Allan Ahlberg was born in 1938 in South London, and grew up in the Black Country. He worked as a teacher, postman, grave digger, soldier and plumber's mate before he became a full-time writer.
He met his wife and creative partner, Janet at teacher training college. It was because Janet wanted to illustrate a book that Allan wrote his first book, the Brick Street boys. After that, together they wrote 37 books.
Janet died in 1994 and Ahlberg discontinued his writing career for a few years before picking it up again.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-This reverse cumulative tale cleverly connects some fairy tales and nursery rhymes. "Goldilocks arrived home all bothered and hot. Previously she had been running like mad in the dark woods. Previously she had been climbing out of somebody else's window." Previously, she had bumped into Jack who "was running like mad in the dark woods with a hen under his arm." Cinderella was "bumped into by-The Gingerbread Boy" and his whole group of followers. The ingenuous acrylic paintings mirror the turnabouts artfully so that, for example, Jack appears four times on the same spread: falling down a hill with Jill, playing soccer, talking with his mother, and exchanging a cow for some beans. The jazzy, colorful pictures display substantive variety: silhouetted figures dance at Cinderella's ball; she previously runs through trees that rise out of Impressionist-like blue-dotted ground; the prince who danced with Cinderella changes into a frog; his head visibly transforms in a series of views atop his normal head. Read this book aloud so that youngsters can chime in and shout the word "previously" 29 times. Children will delight in this energetic, amusing, and very approachable tale.-Kirsten Cutler, Sonoma County Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Along the same lines as David LaRochelle and Richard Egielski's The End (February 2007), but using more predictable elements, Ahlberg and Ingman present a set of linked tales in rewind mode. Goldilocks arrives home "all bothered and hot." Why? Because previously she had run through the forest, having climbed out of somebody's window in the wake of being caught sleeping in someone's bed, etc. Even before that, she had bumped into a lad named Jack with a hen under his arm . . . and so on, through Jack and Jill, the Frog Prince, Cinderella and others--and yet further back, to when all the characters were babies and, even further, the dark woods were seedlings "in the sun and the wind and the rain / under the endless sky, once upon a time. Previously." In Ingman's thickly brushed cartoons, small figures in contemporary dress dash through rolling fields and thick forest before regressing to a spread of diaper-clad infants, then giving way to open, almost abstract landscape. The title word's repetition creates a verbal pattern that comes out more clearly when spoken aloud, but even solitary young readers will follow the plot easily--in either direction. (Picture book. 6-8) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
FOR 21st-century kids growing up surrounded by video games, iPods and YouTube, the idea of playing cat's cradle with a piece of string or snatching quarters off one's elbow may seem as quaint as the corncob dolls in "Little House in the Big Woods." In fact, one worries that all these old skills will be swatted aside by the Nintendo Wii's wireless controller. But now "The Encyclopedia of Immaturity" is here to preserve that knowledge - and to document a few hundred more goofy tips, tricks and gross-out moves of its own. The book, spiral-bound for easy page removal, is tucked inside a bright red cover depicting the "Mona Lisa" with a doodled Vandyke beard. This is a big clue to the level of humor inside. The table of contents reveals a collection of topics sure to intrigue children by name alone: "The Broom & Egg Whap," "Be a Rubber Band Ninja Warrior," "Make a Tomato Goosh Monster" and so on. Most of these undertakings are designed to inspire creativity without the use of a screen, a mouse or a joystick. This handbook of time-wasting fun was assembled by the editors of Klutz, a company that's been making how-to guides and other books since 1977. Activities range from connect-the-dots distractions to science-oriented projects like making a two-liter bottle of diet soda erupt like Mount Vesuvius by dropping a few Mentos mints into it. The Klutz editors have bridged generations of time-honored traditions here, setting down rules for such kiddie customs as calling shotgun, announcing "jinx" and playing truth or dare. Pretending to take off your thumb ("this is the fundamental body dismemberment skill"), bonking your head on a table and other sleight-of-hand pranks are fully illustrated as well, but the text is not about only ancient larks. Mixed in with the golden oldies are newer activities like tapping out tunes with cellphones or copying homemade videos of your eyes to your iPod. Dumb jokes, puzzles and other kid-friendly topics are sprinkled through the book's 400 pages, with explanations and commentary written in a sarcastic voice that most 11-year-olds will immediately identify with - if they are not using it with their parents already: "Set a toilet plunger on the floor two feet in front of the fridge. Your mother might like it to be clean. We don't care." With a nod to short attention spans, most activities are explained in just one or two pages. More complex tasks like how to ride a unicycle are spread over six or seven pages and offer plenty of step-by-step instructions. The book's design is as bouncy and energetic as its content, with each full-color page making use of large, eye-catching illustrations or photographs of kids (and sometimes adults) demonstrating the activity at hand. "The Encyclopedia of Immaturity" lives up to its title. The youthful fascination with bodily fluids, human or otherwise, is repeatedly embraced. Take, for example, "The Peanut Butter Booger Hunt," an arts-and-crafts project that involves filling an empty milk carton with peanut butter, taping a picture of a man to the side and then poking holes through the nostrils to get a finger full of Skippy. It's not an activity for the squeamish. Parents in homes with nice carpeting and upholstery may want to keep an eye on younger kids before turning them loose with any book that features a project called "Do-It-Yourself Dog Barf," but over all, this "encyclopedia" offers an entertaining mix of stunts that should appeal to a wide range of ages. Even adults who have forgotten how to properly throw a Frisbee or play tabletop football with a paper triangle may find themselves thumbing through the pages for a refresher course. There's no harm in that. As the writer Dave Barry (among others) has observed, "You're only young once, but you can always be immature." J.D. Biersdorfer is the production editor of the Book Review.