School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1-This contagiously playful collaboration is filled with sly textual and visual jokes. Songwriter Covert's photo takes center stage on the title page and persists in a hide-and-seek game on the spreads that follow. His face peeks out of a springy kangaroo's pouch, stares between bat wings, flits by in a dragonfly, and reposes in a frog's pouchy cheeks. Keller's impish acrylic and collage illustrations are filled with swirls, sweeps, and explosions of color and shape; their almost musical quality reinforces the song: "Blue fish, red fish,/galloping goats,/puffins and camels/and piranhas in moats." But the song is not just a happy list of animals; it's a wild, whimsical wheedle aimed at two doubting but indulgent parents: "And I wish, I really wish,/I really, really wish/they could be my pets./Oh, please, pretty please,/from the bottom/of my heart/to the top of my head." Readers who don't know Covert's music are at a slight disadvantage: it would be far easier to "hear" the lyrics if the melody were already planted in one's brain. While the words are repeated, along with guitar chords, at book's end, sheet music is not included. Though the abundance of bounciness occasionally makes it hard to follow the text on the page, all is forgiven: in this book, it's the bounce that counts.-Susan Weitz, formerly at Spencer-Van Etten School District, Spencer, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Popular kids' musician Covert (Ralph's World Rocks!) adapts another of his catchy songs in this outing about kids longing for a pet. Two children enthusiastically list the plethora of critters that would make great animal friends-"A gecko and a goose and a humpback whale"-interspersed with the attendant pleas ("Oh, please, pretty please, from the bottom of my heart to the top of my head") and promises ("I'll be really, really good and you know I would feed 'em all day and at night I'd tuck 'em all in their beds") one would expect. A jaunty rhyme scheme and fun wordplay ("Ocelots and lots of sloths and fleas") keep the story bouncing, while the typography's size and color play up the pleading. Keller (The Scrambled States of America) depicts a zany menagerie in kinetic mixed media artwork that's bursting with fun details; keen-eyed readers will spot photos of Covert's face playfully worked into each spread. Keller seamlessly extends the text to create a true family dynamic, as Mom and Dad adamantly protest "Noooooo" early on, but relent in the end. Ages 4-8. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
