  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 02/01/2014 PreS-Gr 2—A yard full of amiable tools comes together to build a toolshed. Meshon's illustrations are bright, bold, and emblazoned with smiling faces. Even the tiniest eraser on a pencil has a cute cartoon face. The large, clear font will make this clever title an appropriate choice for beginning readers and will challenge older readers to move beyond the basics (saw, hammer, nails) and learn about more advanced tools, such as an awl and a T square. To complement the anthropomorphic tools, the text includes onomatopoeia sound effects: "Saw saws Wood. 'Vrip! Vrip! Vrip!' Drill drills Screws. 'Zip! Zip! Zip!'" With this lively text and positive message about the benefits of teamwork, Tools Rule! will please readers with an interest in how things work and provide an opportunity to spur engaging audience participation while reading aloud. This book could provide an excellent jumping-off point to engage students in further informational reading about tools or building structures.—Nora Clancy, Teachers College Community School, New York City - Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Booklist - 03/01/2014 A yard full of anthropomorphized tools organizes itself into action in order to build a shed they can call home. Each of the members of this smiling menagerie performs its job according to plan—drafting, measuring, cutting, assembling, and demonstrating good spirit and admirable teamwork in the process. Meshon (Take Me Out to the Yakyu, 2013) draws the action in flat, blocky simplicity, with heavy outlines and only the occasional shadow. His cartoony characters have a familiar, kawaii sweetness, with big, wide-set eyes and broad smiles, matched in their punny word-balloon dialogue (“What a mess! / Calling all tools . . . / to the workbench / one and all. Awl, that / means you too!”). And the especially vivid palette, with a remarkable range of saturated colors and rich, dense backgrounds, adds to the good-natured ebullience. This friendly, informative outing will appeal to budding builders with an interest in colorful construction. - Copyright 2014 Booklist. Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2014 . . . You are standing on me! Here!”), there begins a flurry of activity as the tools set about noisily doing their assigned tasks. In the end, the satisfied tools put themselves away in the shed they’ve just constructed, and the lights go out. The story merely identifies the tools and watches them work, so it’s light on substance, and while there is some satisfaction in seeing the completed shed at the end, there’s not much plot development or trajectory involved in getting there. The occasional couplets are unpredictably inserted into the prose, and their scansion and rhyme are often clumsy (“Let’s work together to build a toolshed!/ We will have a place to rest our heads!”). The real draw here is in the witty personification of the tools that comes across through humorous quips (Hammer: “Hey, Nails, it’s time to build a wall!” Nail: “OK! Ouch! OK! OK! Ouch!”) and the abundant onomatopoeia. Meshon’s illustrations are hand inked and digitally colored, and their streamlined simplicity suggests coloring-book art, with thick black outlines, bright fields of solid color, and the only texture coming from the scanned grain of the workbench. Little builders may look past the limitations to find this an enjoyable storytime offering, while the final pages of good-night murmurings and snores in speech bubbles among the shed add further usability as a bedtime story for sleepy carpenters. HM - Copyright 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Loading...
 |