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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | BURLEIGH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Newberg Public Library | PLACE BURLEIGH | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Stayton Public Library | E BURLEIGH | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Dawn until dusk, the city is alive with sounds, from the TING-ALING- A-LING of an alarm clock in the morning to the BEEEEEP! BEEEEP! of traffic in the afternoon to the quiet SHHHHHHHHHHHHHH of evening. Noted illustrator Beppe Giacobbe's bright palette and pleasing cityscapes bring the excitement of the city to life in a story that begs to be read aloud again and again.
Author Notes
Robert Burleigh is the award-winning author of many books for children, including The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn , illustrated by Barry Blitt; Night Flight , illustrated by Wendell Minor; Black Whiteness , illustrated by Walter Lyon Krudop; and Sylvia's Bookshop , illustrated by Katy Wu. His many other books include Hoops ; Stealing Home ; and Clang! Clang! Beep! Beep! He lives in Michigan.
Reviews (5)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1-A day in the city begins and ends peacefully with the ticking of the alarm clock and a child's sleeping sounds. The pages in-between showcase scenes from the bustling streets against the backdrop of skyscrapers and public transportation. The rhymes that accompany the story are short but evocative. The day holds many sights and sounds that crescendo with the louder noises. The artist uses a vivid mix of primary and secondary colors to set the stage. At night, the city is transformed using a rich purple with the only light coming from the moon, house lights, and car headlights. Like a scene from a movie, the last spread zooms out of the boy's room to the silhouette of the city and shows a suspension bridge leading into the darkness. A more chaotic page shows lanes of cars with honking horns accompanied by a descriptive rhyme, "Drivers shouting,/In-and-outing." The sounds are placed above or below the objects producing them. The placement and size of the descriptor are never the same. The words "RUMBLE" and "RATTLE" are concealed within a trestle carrying a subway car. Close inspection reveals the boy in almost every scene. The concept is similar to Marilyn Singer's City Lullaby (Clarion, 2007), but more straightforward. A fine selection for children wanting to transport themselves to another place without the hassle of travel.-Lori A. Guenthner, Baltimore County Public Library, Randallstown, MD (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
Alarm clock ringing, / Eardrums stinging..." From morning to night, Burleigh's simple pleasing rhymes and dynamic city scenes take readers through a boy's day. The retro-style, digitally generated illustrations incorporate lots of hand-lettered sound words: e.g., "snore, roar, rumble, rattle," which effectively convey the cacophony but tend to drown out the quieter text. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Using rhymed couplets of only four or five words, Burleigh makes a poem of the noises any child might hear in an urban environment: the alarm clock, the subway, traffic, demolition. The verses sit on each full-page, full-bleed spread while onomatopoeic words splash across the page, incorporated into the artwork: clunk, beep, ring. Giacobbe uses matte color to define his strong shapes and often matches the words to the image: "Flutter flutter" for "pigeons strutting" has white and fluffy letters; the struts under a train bridge form the words "RUMBLE/RATTLE" with their crossbeams. The story, which is told entirely in those tiny couplets, splash words and images, takes a boy through his day, from riding the subway to school with his mom, sketching in art class while watching barges on the lake, getting ice cream and coming home past the "wrecking ball smashing." At home, the images sink into quiet, as the boy has dinner with his family and then falls to sleep, "Darkness creeping, / City sleeping." A vivid sliver of city life. (Picture book. 3-7) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Cities buzz with a fast-paced energy that fascinates the young. Burleigh celebrates this hustle and bustle in short rhyming couplets that catalog the symphony of sounds a young boy encounters on a typical day in the big city ( Subway roaring, / Riders snoring ). From the early morning clang of garbage cans and the rumble of rush-hour traffic to the cheerful din of afternoon crowds going to and fro, the sing-songy poetry captures the sounds and sensory details of urban life. Giacobbe's stylized illustrations wow with vibrant color, strong lines, and a fresh yet retro vibe. His double-page spreads present dynamic city scenes with plenty of whimsical detail and cleverly placed onomatopoeic words. While the book's figures lack diversity, omitting perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of cities their rich blend of cultures and peoples the irresistible cityscapes and playful text will have young urbanites and those anticipating big-city sojourns clamoring for repeat visits.--McKulski, Kristen Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE look a toddler gives a truck is pure desire. Across his face - is it wrong to say "him"? - you see the play of genes and time. Something in the cerebral cortex seems to demand access to cement mixers, dump trucks, cranes and, granddaddy of them all, diggers, which would allow him to multiply his own meager, tiny-handed mixing and digging power. It's why we don't let kids operate motorized vehicles: they would kill us all. Chris Gall has a lot of fun with the primal place of machines in the lives of small children in his brilliant book "Dinotrux." In ripe-to-the-point-of-bursting illustrations - there is something of R. Crumb in his pictures; check out the tiny skirts on the cave ladies! - Gall gives us the creation legend of the truck, our modern vehicles being descendants of the combustion-driven monsters that once roamed free. (Anyone who has caught sight of an idle crane on a clear autumn evening will sense a possible inspiration for this book.) "Millions of years ago," Gall begins, "prehistoric trucks roamed the earth. They were huge. They were hungry. But they weren't helpful like they are today. They rumbled, roared and chomped." Gall catalogs the ancestors of all the favorites: the Craneosaurus, pictured with wide-set eyes and jagged teeth, the sky around it alive with pterodactyls; the Dozeratops battling the Dumploducus, like a couple of union crews showing up at the same no-show work site; and, of course, the Tyrannosaurus Trux, "bully of the jungle!" "Dinotrux" imagines the natural history of heavy equipment. How did the era of trucks end? There was a flash and everything withered and died, and the monstrous machines "shed their teeth and their toenails and their misbehaving ways" and thus evolved into the steel slave race of today. With "Dinotrux" in mind, several other recent books about traffic and cars read like iterations of a unified, exotic past, as both the turtle and the sparrow sound like echoes of the dinosaur. Take, for example, "Clang! Clang! Beep! Beep!," which is about a life lived with machines and the cacophony of town, where the exclamation points fall like snow and the horns sing like church bells. Written by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Beppe Giacobbe, the story follows a boy through a typical day made of sounds so typical you don't notice them - the "ting-a-ling" of the alarm clock, the "grroo-clunk!" of the garbage truck (Garbageadon?). In spare, elegant illustrations, the city is seen on many levels - underground, street and elevated - with the boy moving through a forest no less mysterious than the jungle room of Maurice Sendak. The book ends as it begins, with the boy asleep in his room, the moonlight beaming in, the city waiting only for him to be old enough to step out and carouse. "OK Go," by Carin Berger, picks up where "Clang! Clang! Beep! Beep!" leaves off, straight into dreams of hopped-up vehicles crossing blue skies. Rocket cars, spaceships with bubble tops, beaknosed pilots ghosting over words ("GO! GO! GO!") - it's a vision as giddily surreal as the work of Joan Miró. On the last page you learn that the illustrations, spooky in their clarity, are collages made from recycled materials: found papers, magazines, ticket stubs, old letters and newspapers, which seems right. "The Busiest Street in Town," written by Mara Rockliff and illustrated by Sarah McMenemy, is old-fashioned in contrast, with drawings less reminiscent of Miró than of H.A. Rey. Or perhaps the illustrations - simple and bright, they depict women in colorful hats and pearls - are so "now" they seem old, like one of those brand-new baseball parks made to look like something from the Iron Age. "The Busiest Street in Town" is a fable, the story of a grandmotherly woman, Agatha May Walker, who wants to take gingersnap cookies to her friend Eulalie but cannot get across a street swollen with trucks and cars. We see her standing amid exhaust fumes - "Slow Down!" she yells - like King Xerxes telling his men to flog the Hellespont. Agatha then makes the sort of simple gesture said to change the world: she moves her chair into the street and sits there cheerfully as trucks and cars swerve wildly around her. A weirdly dangerous episode for a picture book, but in it I see a hint of the lone citizen standing in the path of the tank. Here, at least, the gesture itself is enough to defeat the machine. The trucks are stilled, the people come out, the cookies are shared and Parcheesi is played. The book reads like the last chapter in the long struggle between man and his machines, a simple act of defiance being enough to end the terrible reign of the Dinotrux. Rich Cohen is the author of "Israel Is Real" and the father of three boys.