Customer Reviews

The Pencil

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a wonderful book! We checked this out from the library and have read it several times this week, at my 4 year old's request. We will be buying it for ourselves and our friends. This book opens up even a small child's imagination and makes them wonder what will happen next. My four year old wanted to draw a story after reading this book. I'll be looking for more books by this author this weekend at the library.

This is a definite winner from the team that created The Runaway Dinner. The combination of humorous text, quirky drawn out writing style, and clever illustrations all point to another runaway hit! Many of the same characters reappear from the first book, which is extra fun for the readers.

Once there was a pencil, who loved to draw. He sketches wonderful things - a boy and a dog, a cat for the dog to chase, a house, a family for the little boy and even an entire town. He even draws a paintbrush to make his drawings rich with color. And is everyone happy? No! The pencil is overrun with complaints and must draw an eraser to clean things up.

The eraser starts rubbing away and everyone seems satisfied. Yet rather suddenly he gets too excited and starts erasing all sorts of extra things. Poof! The house and town are gone. The pencil must quickly come up with a plan to stop this eraser and save his own skin, er, graphite.

What a wonderfully imaginative story this is. It's a fun read that will have readers rushing through the pages to find out who will prevail in the end. Whimsical illustrations and a quick wit make the entire book fly by far too quickly.

Both my son and I love this book! It's a very creative story about a lone pencil who draws a world around him that comes to life. It's random humor cracks up my 3-year-old, and I adore the uniqueness of it! Great book, very glad I bought it.

This book sparks imagination of kids and motivates them to draw pictures. It is full of subtile humor, too, and the illustrations are so simple and comforting for overloaded children eyes that this very often is our favorite bedtime lecture... I can highly recommend this book.

If you enjoyed Runaway Dinner, you'll love The Pencil. This book shows many of the characters from The Runaway Dinner and what can happen when creation of an overzealous eraser makes things go awry.

This is one of those kids books that breaks the mould and the frame. It is a simple premise but an exciting one. My son loves this book. It is crazy, odd and endering. Some of the 'everything needs a name' gets a bit tiring but most everything else is great. The best bit 'of course'is the pencil drawing. It opens up a world of art and drawing to the reader both young and old. My son is excited to see how a pencil can draw and create elaborate worlds, ideas and stories. It has expanded his and my mind with respect to art and story telling.

This book is touching and hilarious ("Mr.' tried to eat a boiled egg named Billy but it ran away...";). It's my favorite kids book, and we read a ton of books, this is the one I choose even before the kids ask..

This book is so creative and fun and funny with great illustrations. It became an instant favorite in our house and I love how original the story is. I have been telling all of my friends who have children about it and even purchased it for a friend who is a primary school teacher. I highly recommend this book and are so happy to have it as part of our collection!

Wonderful book as others have said. I have been struck by its nature that includes points made by Magritte in painting (painted object is not the object) when put along side the Dogon's idea (cited in Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers..." poetry collection) that a painted rice cake must satisfy our hunger (as we live in an illusory painted world and our hunger is also painted). Do the objects 'replaced' after erasing remain the same objects, the use of a second eraser to erase the first eraser and the first to erase the second so as to remove chaos (meaninglessness) from the world, the connections to the Bhagavid Gita (duty used to eliminate the un-free lives caused by slavery to desire), and PK Dick's gnostic ideas entropy based ideas on meaninglessness. All this in a children's(??) book!

Anyone else notice this or see meaning in it?

This book is very creative and fun to read for all ages! I'll definitely check out other books by this author.