Gruntly Is Too Greedy in All For Me and None For All

Pigs are widely considered to be rather, well, piggy, and that particularly comes across in children’s books. One recent picture book that utilizes this stereotype is All For Me and None For All, written by Helen Lester and illustrated by Lynn Munsinger. This duo has teamed up on many occasions to tell tales of critters behaving badly or having just a little trouble discovering their place in the world. In this case, the main character is a pig named Gruntly who has never learned how to share.

Gruntly’s greediness has given him a bad reputation among his peers, which include a sheep, a chicken, a small dog and two more well-mannered pigs. They know that his motto is the titular phrase; he wants to get as much as he can, and he doesn’t care who he has to deprive in order to satisfy himself. Gruntly certainly comes across as a bully, though it’s hard to say whether he is truly malicious or just completely clueless about how to behave. Either way, his pushy, self-serving demeanor does not make him very popular. Is there any way of reforming this hog?

Lester and Munsinger make a great team, with Lester’s simple but lively text accompanied by Munsinger’s fun pictures. In this book, Woolworth the sheep is the only named animal not to wear clothing of some kind. The pigs are fully garbed in shirts and pants, while the dog wears a shirt and the chicken wears a bandana. While the two other pigs, Hampshire and Berkshire, are difficult to tell apart since they are both gray, Gruntly is easily identifiable as the only pink pig in the bunch, aside from the park ranger who is dressed all in green.

Part of the fun of this story is that it involves a scavenger hunt. Each leg of the hunt features a rhymed clue. Gruntly comes to his own conclusions about the end of each verse in an effort to move things along more quickly, but he guesses the wrong word each time. This leaves kids open to try to guess the correct word themselves before it is revealed. It also furnishes a lesson about the importance of patience and of following directions accurately.

The primary lesson in the book, however, is to share with others and not take things that don’t belong to you. For a hoggy youngster like Gruntly, drilling that message into his head is no easy task, but the method is a good one for impressing upon children the value of courtesy and generosity.

Grandmas and Grandpas Both Give Their Best to Their Grandkids

So many children are fortunate enough to have grandparents who can dote on them and teach them about the world. In What Grandmas Do Best / What Grandpas Do Best, Laura Numeroff and illustrator Lynn Munsinger explore the power of this bond. Both Numeroff and Munsinger have numerous books to their credit, most involving animals. This one is especially simplistic, especially on Numeroff’s end, but I like the clever concept behind the book. It’s not the sort of book that seems likely to demand frequent repeat readings, but it would make a nice addition to a child’s shelf.

There are only 12 sentences in this book - and six of them are exactly the same as the other six, with the exception of one word. Half of the book shows all the things that Grandmas can do; the other half, which is read by turning the book upside down and opening the book from the opposite cover, has to do with grandpas’ activities. And what do you know? They’re the same things. This encourages a sense of gender equality and allows for some fun as we see how the grandpas and grandmas approach the same things differently.

At the same time, it makes for a rather uninvolved book, especially since ten of the twelve sentences begin “Grandmas / Grandpas can...” And the last sentence in each half of the book merely delays that opening with an introductory clause. The first five sentences in each half contain three activities per sentence, with each activity on a separate page. This makes the format very predictable and a bit stilted, since there is no variety in the sentence structure.

However, while Numeroff might be accused of sacrificing creativity for structure here, Munsinger’s illustrations are engaging as always. For each of the ten initial sentences, Munsinger provides three illustrations of the same child-grandparent pair. Hence, we feel like we’re getting a bit of a peek into the lives of ten different families. Most pictures show only the child and the grandparent, always working and playing together in close quarters.

The final page of each half, meanwhile, shows all five pairs scattered around a white page. Perhaps the most engaging of the illustrations are actually the two-page spreads immediately inside the book, which bring all the characters into close proximity with each other in a couple of outdoorsy scenes. There’s even some interaction among them, as the dogs and pigs on the Grandpa side share an umbrella and the raccoons and mice on the Grandma side work together to build a sandcastle.

The unique layout of the book, coupled with the adorable illustrations, makes it a cute choice for very young children to read with their own grandparents. It might even spark an idea or two about what they can do on their next outing, and perhaps reading it will inspire a brand-new grandparent-grandchild portrait. While this is not the most complex project either Numeroff or Munsinger has taken on, What Grandmas Do Best / What Grandpas Do Best is a very cute tribute to the love that grandparents and grandchildren share.

Smelly Skunks! May Not Be Educational, But It Sure Is Fun!

A short while ago, I saw a ludicrous video on Saturday Night Live entitled Sloths! Made, in the context of the skit, by several students who, to quote the matter-of-fact farmer on the cranberry juice commercial, have obviously been "hittin' the DVDs pretty hard," it features sloths engaged in a variety of high-octane activities, prompting the bewildered zookeeper viewing the film to note that it was not quite accurate.

I had this Digital Short in my mind when I picked up Skunks!. I expected that it would probably turn out to be a mostly sedate educational book about these much-maligned creatures. As it turns out, there is nothing educational about this over-the-top picture book. It is every bit as inaccurate as Sloths! But that's okay.

Author David T. Greenberg fills the book with wacky verse that stretches rhymes in silly ways ("family" and "pajamily," "undies" and "sundies"). He also uses the end-rhyme "unk" as much as possible, particularly in the beginning of the book: "The stankiest stink to stunk / Far worse than a moldy garbage can / When you reach down and scoop out the gunk / A million times worse than octopus armpits / Or sniffing an elephant trunk / Is the galling, appalling, truly enthralling / Glorious stink of a skunk!" Ewwwwwwwwwww...

Greenberg gives us a young rascal who thinks up ingeniously devious ways to put his pet skunk to use, from replacing the salad dressing with his spray or using him as a super soaker. The scenarios get more bizarre as the book goes on, culminating in an attack by Skunkzilla and Skunk Kong, who are just as huge and vicious as they sound.

These absurd situations are hilariously illustrated by Lynn Munsinger in a delightful and often disgusting colorfully cartoonish style. We see the smiling red-head sporting a skunk hat, sleeping blissfully on a bed of skunks and imagining a Christmas Eve ride with eight antlered skunks. Those with delicate sensibilities will probably want to avoid this book, which seems to be aimed primarily at boys in the 7 to 10 range. It's wildly imaginative and odiferous; thank goodness these aren't scratch and sniff pages!