Cora Lee Merriweather may have a sour lemon-pucker mouth, but she makes the sweetest cakes around. When the elderly baker dies and the Merriweather Bake Shop is sold, Cora Lee’s ghost is not happy: “Get out of my kitchen!” the furious phantom shouts at the first three owners. They do. Years later, however, a fearless African-American pastry chef named Annie Washington falls in love with the shop. Cora Lee goes in for the kill, shrieking, smashing eggs, the whole works, until the baker finally breaks: “ ‘Enough!’ Annie cried. ‘What do you want?’ ” Cora Lee mysteriously demands a cake “like one I might have baked, but that no one ever made for me.” “Piece of cake,” Annie says. But neither babkas nor bundts can scratch Cora Lee’s itch, until Annie visits the library and discovers what the long-ago orphaned baker really wants. Priceman’s gleeful watercolor-and-ink illustrations capture Cora Lee’s ghostly hauntings with all the right swoops and swirls in this sweet story of how generous dollops of perseverance and kindness make the perfect cake. (recipe) (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: July 25, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-44557-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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