The Awful Aardvarks Shop for School - Hardcover

The first week of September means the annual back-to-school shopping spree for school supplies, and even not-quite-civilized aardvarks need new backpacks, notebooks, and markers (both the fat kind and the skinny kind, as every parent of a first-grader knows). The author and illustrator (The Awful Aardvarks Go to School,1997) team up for this second accounting of amusing aardvark antics, with Lindbergh's clever rhyming couplets and a continuing device of the shopping list repeating on the border of each two-page spread. The quartet of Awful Aardvarks romps through the Shop-All-Day Mall as items are crossed off their list, causing mischief in one shop after another and headaches for the animal shopkeepers. Pearson's loose watercolors are a busy delight, with expressive faces on the horrified store clerks and fellow shoppers and lots of little details to discover in multiple readings. Just after exiting a candy store with sticky hands and faces, the aardvarks cause particular trouble for the bowtied bear shopkeepers in the Bears and Bubbles Bookstore. All the shoppers stopped shopping and gave them weird looks. The Aardvarks were stuck--they were stuck to the books! (Don't miss the display of award-winning Called-a-Cat Books.) No money changes hands for all the aardvark purchases, and no shopping bags (or momma aardvark) are seen to hold all the new supplies, but who needs a realistic view of the modern mall when you can have roly-poly aardvarks racing on Rollerblades or trying on feather boas? A rollicking romp of a picture book that will make an excellent first-day-of-school story for primary-grade kids. (Picture book. 4-7) -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Kindergarten-Grade 1-The Aardvarks go to the mall to buy school supplies and clothing, and as they shop, they leave a confused trail of dropped, thrown, and otherwise misused objects behind. Accompanied by several amazed hens and observed by puzzled sheep, penguins, and other animals, the Aardvarks climb on everything in sight, dive into a bagel bin, toss themselves with the salad in the Food Court, and have a terrific time. Unlike Sue Denim's "Dumb Bunnies" (Scholastic) or Harry Allard's "Stupids" (Houghton), they are riotous and uncontrolled. Moreover, there are no puns or wordplay, which may be disappointing to fans of the previously mentioned clowning creatures. The rhymes seem a little lackluster compared to the frenetic activity of the scribbly, colorful cartoons that fill each double-page spread, but they do serve to narrate the chaotic action. With their sheer daffy energy, these animals, will doubtless find their own fans.
Marian Drabkin, Richmond Public Library, CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.