School Library Journal Review
K-Gr 2-- A forgettable effort that's as rambling and disjointed as a story told by a four-year-old. While Mrs. Cactus-Eared Rabbit is bedridden with a cold, her children and their friends make breakfast. Predictably, they make an enormous mess, spilling and scorching with abandon. A gruesome meal of boiled-down chicken soup and coffee, served inside a strange edifice built of burned muffins and butter, inexplicably revives Mrs. Rabbit. She heads for the kitchen, to the dismay of the children. `` `Don't worry . . . everything's okay!' '' shouts Greyer Coyote, standing in the midst of chaos. ``And so it was,'' reads the final page, with all the animals sipping milk at a suddenly spic-and-span table. Even the smallest listener won't believe the situation was resolved so quickly and painlessly. Busy, childlike watercolors can't overcome the silly story and awkward writing. For messy-breakfast stories with more appeal, go with Jillian Wynot's The Mother's Day Sandwich (Orchard) and No Thumpin', No Bumpin', No Rumpus Tonight (Atheneum, both 1990) by Nancy Patz. --Lucy Young Clem, Evansville Vanderburgh County Public Library, IN (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
When Mrs. C. E. Rabbit gets a cold, her children and their friends decide to make her a get-well breakfast, with disastrous results. In the end, the ever-patient mother rabbit must get up and restore order to the messy kitchen. Jill Murphy's 'Peace at Last' (Putnam) has a similar theme with far more humor and a better focused story. From HORN BOOK 1990, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A weird apprenticeship supposedly qualified R.B. Sparkman to write this book: he lived with and studied the ways of five con artists during Houston's energy boom in the early 1970s, was personally duped out of $800 by one of them and $200 by another, and gleaned such pearls of wisdom as ""manipulate a friend--a person who likes and respects you. . . ."" For those who care, his techniques are based largely on psychological truisms like intermittent reinforcement, persistence, equating money with power, and applied friendship. Sparkman doesn't worry about such extraneous details as morality; he does, however, observe that his five mentors had no real friends, so on the whole manipulation is more profitable when it's ""unselfish"": "". . . you'll serve your own self-interest by applying the golden rule as you manipulate people."" Sydney Schweitzer's Winning with Deception and Bluff (p. 316) may have been no loftier, but at least it refrained from such absurd pretensions. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.