Penguin And Little Blue

Penguin and Little Blue

From School Library JournalPreSchool-Grade 2-Penguin and Little Blue perform stunts at a San Francisco water park, miles from Antarctica. They enjoy one another's company, but Penguin misses his many friends, with whom he longs to dive, huddle, and chatter. Their lives change dramatically when a promoter takes their show on the road. They stay in plush hotels all over the country, enjoying the amenities and indulging in room service, until one day Penguin spots a luxury cruise ship bound for his home. He books their passage on the spot, and a week later, the adventure ends with a joyful reunion at the South Pole. Inspired by a "hilarious" press photo of two penguins in a hotel room, McDonald's lighthearted fish-out-of-water tale anthropomorphizes its title characters in some ways, but they remain penguins at heart. Bright, icy blues predominate in Tillotson's oil paintings, which flesh out the comical aspects of the animals' predicament. A cheerful, charming read.Catherine Threadgill, Charleston County Public Library, SCCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.Despite their success as performers, Penguin and Little Blue long to return home to Antarctica to once again revel in the joys of white ice, blue ice, pancake ice, pencil ice, ice cakes, and ice falls, and set into motion a clever plan to get there!From BooklistPreS-Gr. 1. Penguin and his partner, Little Blue, are performers at Water World in San Francisco. After they are told that their show is going on the road, Penguin dreams of going home to Antarctica. Instead, the show winds up in Kansas, where the desire to re-create the icy waters of their homeland gets the performers into trouble with hotel security. In city after city, the penguins try to make themselves at home. They paint their hotel room black and white and order krill (they settle for shrimp), but they still miss Antarctica and their penguin friends. Then one day in Miami they spot a cruise ship and Penguin declares, "We've signed our last autograph! We're going home." Tillotson's masterful oil paintings, drenched in cool blues, nicely convey the penguins' massive iceberg homeland as well as the joy of coming home to "hundreds of thousands of penguins, all dressed for a party!" Use this in conjunction with a science unit on penguins or a study of Antarctica. Lauren PetersonCopyright