Levert's (the Molly Bear series) sly illustrations provide much of the humor in first-timer Dyer's story of a girl who harbors a runaway penguin for a couple of nerve-wracking days. On Tina's class trip to the zoo, a penguin throws himself at her feet. She smuggles him out dressed in her coat and her pink beret. Levert's gouache illustration shows Tina on the bus talking to her girlfriend, oblivious both to ugly plastic insects held out by marauding boys and to the penguin, mute and goggle-eyed beside them. Tina spends the rest of her time trying to make the penguin comfortable in her room while evading her mother's questions about the new "stuffed toy" on her bed ("Oh, that penguin. I got him at the zoo"). She feeds him sardines and sleeps with the window open, but when she finds him standing in the refrigerator and has to pick his feathers out of the jam, she admits, "I don't think this is working out." The next morning, the penguin disappears. However, a television special about Antarctica gives her a glimpse of a penguin in a pink beret. The tale doesn't provide all the satisfactions of typical alien-hidden-in-the-bedroom stories; Tina never has much fun with her penguin nor does she get a chance to display much heroism once she helps him flee from the zoo. But Levert's whimsical illustrations make up the deficit. Ages 5-8.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 2-When a penguin follows Tina after a class trip to the zoo, she dresses him in her pink coat and beret and takes him home on the bus. The expected difficulties of keeping him a secret ensue, but ultimately the bird finds a way to get back to Antarctica. The watercolor-and-gouache illustrations colorfully capture the action, showing Tina as she tries to accommodate her guest, and careful inspection reveals whimsical touches such as the boys on the school bus who hold out tiny creatures meant to frighten the child and her friend. Though the subject has broad appeal, this wordy story plugs along and is not as successful as Helen Lester's Tacky the Penguin (1988) and its sequels or Margret and H. A. Rey's Whiteblack the Penguin Sees the World (2000, both Houghton).
Linda M. Kenton, San Rafael Public Library, CA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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