Review by Booklist Review
This companion to 1 Big Salad (2016) and ABC Pasta (2017) celebrates shapely desserts. Medina's forest includes a macaron owl (circle), carmelita deer (square), crispy rice wolf (cross), chocolate-dipped pretzel mice (line), lemon tart goldfinches (triangle), strawberry foxes (heart), baklava squirrels (parallelogram), jelly bean butterflies (oval), brownie bear (rectangle), cupcake raccoon (crescent), pecan pie chipmunks (arrow), and pineapple yellow warblers (star). Each illustration includes a photograph of the sweet, set against a white background and embellished digitally. Brownie bear, for example, sports a rectangular brownie body with ears, tail, feet, and facial features drawn in black line, with several stylized green trees in the background. Shapes are identified in words and pictures, further stressing the concepts. Most treats are depicted as traditionally cut, with only a few engineered to illustrate an unusual shape (i.e., arrow-shaped pecan pie). The final spread depicts the treats all together, and a chocolate-covered strawberry recipe is appended. An appealing choice for a lapshare or toddler story hour; be prepared to fill treat requests afterward.--Weisman, Kay Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1-Medina creates a feast of sweet treats in the forest, from a rice treat wolf to a strawberry fox. Formatted like 1 Big Salad, this book emphasizes the shapes of various foods to create a host of wild animals. Each shape is named and highlighted along with the treat animals, including a circle, line, and even an arrow. Medina's art is created using the same digital tricks as her previous book, with the baked goods being credited as being in and around the area of Washington, DC. It wraps up with a simple recipe for creating chocolate-covered strawberries. The visuals of some treats are more successful than others, but they're all colorful and designed to attract attention. Pairing the two titles and ABC Pasta could lead to a delicious concept storytime. VERDICT Buy where concept books are needed and where Medina's other titles are popular.-Shana Shea, Windsor Public Library, CT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Medina embellishes color photos of sweet treats to create forest-animal likenesses meant to teach children about shapes: Macaron Owl represents a circle, Lemon Tart Goldfinches represent triangles, etc. Between this sumptuous book and Medina's two previous food-centric offerings, ABC Pasta and 1 Big Salad, kids can enjoy a balanced diet of basic concepts. A recipe for chocolate-covered strawberries is appended. (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Medina presents the third in a series (ABC Pasta and 1 Big Salad, both 2016) that brings together an early-learning concept, photographed food items, doodled black lines, and a unifying setting.Here, 12 shapesfruits, sweets, and baked goods sourced in Medina's Washington, D.C., environsare embodied as forest animals. Each shape is depicted and spelled out in all-caps at the top of a page. Thick black lines turn the bright pink circle of a macaron into an owl; oval jelly beans become the bodies of butterflies. Most of the sweets' shapes derive from the way they're cut: there's a square "Carmelita Deer" and a rectangular "Brownie Bear." This conceit stretches to include a cross, cut from a Rice Krispies square, for a wolf's face and arrows cut from pecan-pie slices standing in as chipmunks. Thick line drawings lend a coloring-book feel to the compositions, since many animals appear against white space. Typefaces selected for display and text type (Burbank big wide and Bodoni Six) compete with rather than complement each other, and digitally stylized branches, grass, and other bits add to the visual disjointedness. A recipe for chocolate-covered strawberries, requiring a double boiler, a pound of bittersweet chocolate, and an unspecified quantity of strawberries, is appended.While fans of the earlier titles might enjoy every bite of this one, it doesn't jell as well as its predecessors, conceptually or visually. (Picture book. 3-5) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
