August 15, 2017
A bandit wipes out Betty's Bakery! Can the Gumshoe Zoo crack the case?Detective Antoine is interrupted in midsentence--"Always anticipate an alarm. At...any..."--by a frantic call from a panda named Betty. "A bread bandit burgled my bakery before breakfast." Antoine assembles his multispecies squad, and they all head to the crime scene in their big purple van. Nichols' tale progresses through the alphabet in chunks of alliterative narrative. When the squad gets to the bakery, goat Quentin declares, "We'll find the fully fed, fiendish foe." As the investigation continues, Quentin buys some snacks, offering "maybe a meager morsel from the mini-market?" Betty is too distraught to eat: "I'm in need of nary a nibble." Detective Steve, a monkey, finds a solid lead in a half-eaten tart: "If we trace the teeth tracks in this torn tart.../ We can ultimately uncover an unusual underbite." They do, straight to Betty! She's not only a sleepwalker, she's a sleep-eater. Detective Morgan, a white bird, sums it up: "We zipped this zany zigzagging zinger with zeal!" The appendix gives a nice description of alliteration as well as descriptions of five notable leaders of the animal world. The story is a crisp and clever caper, laid out like a comic book in panels. The simple cartoons are rendered in pencil on paper and colored digitally. This tasty treat's bound to have young readers alliterating along. (Picture book. 3-6)
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September 15, 2017
Grades K-3 In the wee hours of the morning, the pastry-packed shelves of Betty the panda's bakery were thoroughly plundered. No bagels or buns! No carrot cake or cornbread! Distraught, Betty calls in the Gumshoe Zoo to track down the sticky-fingered thief. Arranged like a graphic novel, this culinary mystery unfolds through large, paneled illustrations, following the detectives' investigation and delivering dialogue through speech bubbles. Sometimes the patter sounds a little silly, but that's part of the fun, because these words are on a mission to demonstrate alliteration. Nichols sequences the animals' word-dense conversations from A to Z, devoting at least one page to each of the alphabet's 26 sounds. It's a clever way to spark young readers' awareness of this linguistic device, even if they miss the meaning of a few of the wordsfor instance, My enticing edibles were entirely extracted. As this is a book devoted to phonetics, it is at its best when read aloud. A funny plot twist at story's end reveals the bakery bandit, ensuring it entertains as it educates.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
January 1, 2018
With large panels and legible font, this picture-book graphic novel is a silly mystery combining clever alliterative wordplay with appealing characters and gentle humor. The animal PIs of Gumshoe Zoo, drawn in pencil and digitally colored, help sleep-eating panda Betty realize her own culpability in the alleged burglary of her bakery. Back matter explains the (effectively used) device of alliteration and provides trivia about animal eating habits.
(Copyright 2018 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)