From School Library Journal
Starred Review. Grade 2–5—Gather all of your chuckle-bellied trivia snatchers for a rollicking romp through the states. Talbott has created wisecrack-filled cartoons featuring birds in competition for the "United Tweets of America Pageant." Each avian contestant has one page to flaunt its stuff and introduce its state—unless you count the cardinal from Indiana that pecks through the back of his page to ruffle feathers in Illinois. The cartoons range from a scenic and graceful tree full of purple finches in a snowy village in Vermont to a manic pelican with a mouthful of loot in Louisiana. There's plenty to make children laugh: Annoyed by Delaware's Blue Hen Chicken on the facing page, Connecticut's American Robin sings, "Yankee Doodle went to town,/followed by a chicken,/if that bird won't shut his beak,/he's gonna get a lickin'." There's also plenty to amuse adults that may fly over children's heads: "Nevada produces the most gold of any state, but California already won the title of the Golden State, so Nevada settled for the silver. (The bronze went to Romania.)" Not to be confused with a reference book, this title does not provide the same type of information for each state. Each page dependably names the state bird and capital, shows a small shape map of the state, and gives its nickname. After that, it's a free-for-all. Ending with a fractured version of "America the Beautiful," it must be said, this book is a hoot.—
Ellen Heath, Easton Area Public Library, Easton, PA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
In this sly, comic, and irreverent book, loaded with hilarious puns and parodies about our 50 state birds, words and images deliver bits of history, folklore, and geography about each state. Young grade-schoolers probably won’t understand all the humor (the illustration of Iowa’s American goldfinch shows two of the birds dressed up like the folks in Grant Wood’s American Gothic; Washington state’s goldfinch is said to sound like “dot-com-dot-com-dot-com”). But many will enjoy the images of the Baltimore oriole in a baseball cap throwing a crab cake in Maryland, the American robin riding a Harley-Davidson in Wisconsin, and the mockingbird of Mississippi resembling Elvis with a mike. Talbott’s colored pencil and mixed-media illustrations ably combine the cartoon uproar with a sense of the individuality of the feathered creatures—as with the shy hermit thrush of Vermont singing musical notes that fill the sky. Clever, refreshing, and fun for individual reading and wonderful for classroom teachers. Grades 3-5. --Hazel Rochman
