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Summary
Summary
Little Elephant and Mama Elephant are going for a walk. "Hold on to my tail," says Mama. "If you want to ask me a question, tweak twice." Tweak, tweak! "Mama, what is that?" Little Elephant is curious about the frog, the monkey, the songbird, the butterfly, and the crocodile--and especially about what a little elephant can do. Mama knows just how to answer, to help her cherished Little Elephant grow.
Eve Bunting's tender text and Sergio Ruzzier's whimsical illustrations make this walk with Mama an excursion any little elephant would enjoy.
Author Notes
Eve Bunting was born in 1928 in Maghera, Ireland, as Anne Evelyn Bunting. She graduated from Northern Ireland's Methodist College in Belfast in 1945 and then studied at Belfast's Queen's College. She emigrated with her family in 1958 to California, and became a naturalized citizen in 1969.
That same year, she began her writing career, and in 1972, her first book, "The Two Giants" was published. In 1976, "One More Flight" won the Golden Kite Medal, and in 1978, "Ghost of Summer" won the Southern California's Council on Literature for Children and Young People's Award for fiction. "Smokey Night" won the American Library Association's Randolph Caldecott Medal in 1995 and "Winter's Coming" was voted one of the 10 Best Books of 1977 by the New York Times.
Bunting is involved in many writer's organizations such as P.E.N., The Authors Guild, the California Writer's Guild and the Society of Children's Book Writers. She has published stories in both Cricket, and Jack and Jill Magazines, and has written over 150 books in various genres such as children's books, contemporary, historic and realistic fiction, poetry, nonfiction and humor.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-While on a walk, Mama Elephant's baby holds onto her tail and "tweaks twice" to ask a question. Little Elephant's curiosity is piqued many times along the way. The parent-child discussion is sweet and encouraging: "`Mama? What is that?' `That is a frog.' `What is he doing?' `He's jumping.' `Can I jump?' `No, because you are not a frog. You are a little elephant. But you can stomp your foot and make a big sound.'" Little Elephant is also intrigued by the monkey, crocodile, butterfly, and bird and wonders if she, too, can swing, swim, fly, or sing. Mama's patient answers point out Little Elephant's own inimitable abilities. Ruzzier's ink and watercolor illustrations charmingly capture the youngster's imaginings as she leaps over cliffs (with worried frogs looking on) and croons to an audience of bemused birds. The gentle text is perfect for sharing with toddlers.-Linda Ludke, London Public Library, Ontario, Canada (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this tender story from Bunting (Will It Be a Baby Brother?), Mama Elephant advises Little Elephant to "tweak twice," by pulling on her tail, if she has any questions while they go for a walk. And at almost every turn of the page, Little Elephant does. Ruzzier's delicate lines and subdued colors match the tenor of the text, as Little Elephant asks her mother to identify various animals (a frog, a monkey, a bird, etc.), then wonders if she can also jump, climb, or sing. "Can I sing like that?" Little Elephant asks. "No, because you are not a bird.... But you can trumpet-like this. RO-OAR!" Ruzzier (Hey, Rabbit!) warmly conveys the small elephant's emotions and the reactions of other animals in fantasy spreads that show the elephant leaping between cliffs, swimming, and soaring through the sky. Despite the quiet plot and gentle tone, ample sound effects give the story pep, and the tail-pulling is a fun elephantine analogue to the way toddlers pull on a parent's pant leg or skirt hem with questions of their own. Ages 3-7. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
Enter another insatiably curious elephant's child, this one benefiting from a mother's guidance as she explores her world. "'Hold on to my tail, Little Elephant,' Mama Elephant said. 'Today we are going for a walk. If you want to ask me a question, tweak twice.'" And tweak and ask Little Elephant does: from the names of the animals they encounter along the way (frog, monkey, crocodile, butterfly, songbird) to what each animal is doing (jumping, climbing an acacia tree, swimming in the river, flying high in the sky, singing). Can she, Little Elephant, do those things, too? Only in her imagination, it turns out, but each time Mama offers an attractive alternative (and young audiences can play right along): rather than jump, she can stomp her foot; rather than sing, she can trumpet. What else can Little Elephant do? She can "grow to be a big, strong, smart, beautiful elephant." On their way home, it's Little Elephant who leads the way, full of confidence and healthy self-esteem. The pairing of Bunting's traditional text, powered by an elegant repeating structure, with Ruzzier's offbeat art is unexpectedly fabulous. The surreal, rather Seussian landscape (check out those hallucinatory flowers and purple hills) makes the transition to the spreads of Little Elephant's imagined experiences effortless; the spare spikiness is also a salutary contrast to the elephants' rounded forms and general adorableness. martha v. parravano (c) Copyright 2011. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Elephant mother and daughter enact an ages-old parent-child ritual. This book presents a pretty and friendly world, in which Mama Elephant is blue, Little Elephant is white and rosy, the sand is peach and every animal wears an expression of contented amusement. When Little Elephant goes for a walk with Mama, she holds on to Mama's tail and tweaks it twice to ask a question. Little sees a frog jumping and wants to know, "Can I jump?" Readers turn the page to a spread of Little flying through the air to the shock of the frogs below. "No," says Mama, "because you are not a frog. You are a little elephant. But you can stomp your foot and make a big sound." "Like that, Mama?" "Just like that, my little elephant," and the picture shows Little making quite a fine STOMP, STOMP! As they walk, Little imagines climbing an acacia tree like the monkeys, flying with a very anthropomorphic and beruffled butterfly and singing like a bird, only to learn what elephants do instead. Mama praises her for asking questions, so she can learn and grow to be "a big, strong, smart, beautiful elephant"just like her Mama, suggests Little Elephant. In a nice touch, it is Little who leads Mama back home, past all the animals they saw on their walk. Captures exactly and sweetly a developmental ideal for both child and parent. (Picture book. 3-5)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
On a walk in the wild, Little Elephant asks her mother about each creature they see: What is it? What is it doing? And can Little Elephant do that, too? Can I jump like a frog? she asks on one spread, and the uncluttered, soft-toned, line-and-wash illustrations show the young animal imagining herself leaping from a cliff. No, Mama answers, but she can stomp her foot and make a big sound, and so Little Elephant does. As the questions and answers continue, Little Elephant learns more about what she can do: she can't swim like a crocodile, for example, but she can pull up river water through her trunk and spray herself. Young children will enjoy following Little Elephant's fantasies, depicted in the uncluttered, double-page spreads, all the way to the story's climax, which celebrates what Little Elephant really is, as well as the big, strong creature she will grow up to be. Along with the imaginative silliness, the nurturing parent-child tenderness is the core of the story.--Rochman, Hazel Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The land heavyweights of the animal kingdom figure largely in three picture books. TWEAK TWEAK By Eve Bunting. Illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier. 40 pp. Clarion Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $14.99. (Picture book; ages up to 3) POMELO BEGINS TO GROW By Ramona Badescu. Illustrated by Benjamin Chaud. Translated by Claudia Bedrick. 48 pp. Enchanted Lion Books. $16.95. (Picture book; ages 4 to 8) GRANDPA GREEN Written and illustrated by Lane Smith. 32 pp. Roaring Brook Press. $16.99. (Picture book; ages 5 to 9) FEW creatures can compete with elephants when it comes to being both magnificent and ungainly, but human children, if we're being honest with ourselves, come close. This sense of distant kinship, plus the fact that trunks are the coolest appendages this side of opposable thumbs, may be why elephants have been a staple of children's literature since the days of Rudyard Kipling and Jean de Brunhoff. True, they're not quite so numerous on the bookshelf as bunnies, mice and ducklings, but they outnumber squids by a long shot, and, what with their tree-stump legs, bulky bodies, sail-like ears and those sinuous trunks, elephants are surely more fun for illustrators to draw than just about anything, aside from explosions. So elephants: bring 'em on! And here they are, in two new picture books that use elephant protagonists to explore the pleasures and anxieties of growing up, and a third, on the far side of the equation, in which an elephant symbolizes age and endurance - thanks, presumably, to the species' reputation for long memory and Botox-defying wrinkles. I loved "Pomelo Begins to Grow." Funny, smart and idiosyncratic, graceful and intuitive in a way that feels as much dreamed as written, Ramona Badescu's tale (translated from the French) is less a story per se than a series of musings, a kind of ad hoc therapy session for those conflicted about getting older, which, in contemporary America, where middle-aged men dress like skate punks and 20-something women covet face-lifts, means pretty much everyone. Badescu's title character is a little garden elephant (distant relative to a lawn flamingo, I learned from an online garden-supply catalog), who notices one morning that "his favorite dandelion" seems unusually small. So too some strawberries, a pebble, a potato and an ant Light bulb: Pomelo realizes it's he himself who's getting bigger. At first, this is cause for elation. "Yippee! Yahoo! Yay! All at once, Pomelo feels the super-hyper-extra force of the cosmos spreading through him." I wouldn't want to be the parent who has to explain this metaphysical conceit to a 4-year-old, though Benjamin Chaud's wonderful illustration of Pomelo vaulting between planets puts the mood across nicely. But back on earth, after banging his head on a low-hanging tomato, Pomelo - whose giant circular eyes with their giant circular pupils owe something to Mo Willems's pigeon - begins to have second thoughts. "Is he already too big for his world? . . . Pomelo begins to forget what it was like to be really little." Children, who in my experience are far more nostalgia-prone than adults - I've seen kids pine for half an hour ago - will surely relate to this sense of impending loss. A cheeky writer, Badescu risks parental dismay by tossing in further anxieties that might never have occurred to kids, like Pomelo's fear that he "won't grow equally all over." The final page finds our hero still trying to make sense of what's happening to his body, but confident and ready for adventure. Kids will be reassured as well as stimulated and amused; adults will find their own resonances. I wish I had been as charmed by Eve Bunting's "Tweak Tweak," which treads a more familiar path through similar territory. Here, Mama Elephant takes Little Elephant for a walk. Little Elephant spots a frog leaping across a pond and wants to know if she can jump like that too. "No," says Mama Elephant, "because you are not a frog. You are a little elephant. But you can stomp your foot and make a big sound." A monkey climbing a tree, a crocodile swimming in a river and an airborne butterfly prompt similar questions and similar "no, but" self-esteem bolstering: yes, everyone's special in his or her own special way, everyone should love himself and everyone will find a place in the world. The good news is that children, not having already read 100 books with a similarly worthy moral (not to mention the entire run of O: The Oprah Magazine), won't gag. In that vein, Sergio Ruzzier's illustrations are pretty and perfectly nice. I'LL be honest: It's a stretch to include "Grandpa Green," by Lane Smith (probably best known as the illustrator of "The Stinky Cheese Man"), in this elephant-themed review, but the book is such an unassuming little masterpiece it deserves the shoehorning. A "plot" summary won't do it justice, since the book's power lies in its rich, allusive artistry, but here goes: a boy narrates the story of his great-grandfather's life - from birth through adolescence, war, marriage, parenthood and into old age - while walking through a topiary garden whose figures illustrate, either literally or symbolically, scenes from the great-grandfather's life. Near the end, the boy notes, "Now he's pretty old and he sometimes forgets things" - that's where a topiary elephant comes in - "but the important stuff the garden remembers for him." That thought leads into a beautiful foldout of the entire garden, a full life in shrubbery; left unsaid is that the boy himself is another kind of memory-garden. Unlike "Tweak Tweak," this volume, I'm guessing, will find more passionate readers among parents than children - I'm not sure how nostalgic children are about other people's lives - though some will respond to the craft and artfully distilled sentiment. Those who don't will at least enjoy getting lost in the pictures, and may not even mind the relative paucity of trunks and tusks. Bruce Handy, a deputy editor at Vanity Fair, is currently writing a book about reading children's books as an adult.
