Age: 2+ The jaunty rhyming story of Mother Hen's attempted rescue of her missing chick is a treat to read aloud. Stuck in the Mud, by Jane Clarke, illustrated by Gary Parsons (Puffin, pounds 5.99). Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc.
While rhyme and rhythm are not always intuitive, the repetition of characters pushing, pulling, and becoming stuck is a delightful setup for the book's unexpected ending.-Madeline Walton-Hadlock, San Jose Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Only when the situation looks hopeless does the chick jump effortlessly out of the mud and declare, "-I'm not stuck now and I wasn't stuck then!-thanks for playing with me!" Bright paintings in solid colors and simple, yet expressive cartoon animals are well suited to very young listeners, who will relate to the mischievous chick and his overprotective mom. One by one, the rescuers also become mired in the muck. She spots him in the middle of a patch of "mucky mud," assumes he is trapped, and clucks hysterically until her friends come to help pull him out. PreS-K-One morning, a hen awakens to find a chick missing from her brood. But Parsons (Trouble at the Dinosaur Cafe) assembles a memorably emotive animal cast, and it's a lot of fun to watch this hapless and increasingly chagrined group struggle its way toward a totally unnecessary rescue.
"And with a small plop,/ Chick jumped off the mud/ with a skip and hop." Clarke's predictable rhymes and word choices ("It's purr-fectly easy," says a cat, "I'll soon pull you free") may make presiding adults yearn for Jez Alborough's far punchier mud-as-nemesis tale, Duck in a Truck. The chain of pullers and pushers grows long enough to require a gatefold spread, at which point the cheeky chick reveals that he was never in any danger: "It's time I got out," he announces. After getting stuck herself trying to free him, she enlists the entire farm population to help her one by one, each gets entrapped in the mud as well. A hysterical hen is convinced that her beloved chick is meeting his doom in the farmyard's deep, thick mud.
0 kommentar(er)
