As a digital subscriber, you’ll receive unlimited access to Horn Book web exclusives and extensive archives, as well as access to our highly searchable Guide/Reviews Database.
To access other site content, visit The Horn Book homepage.
To continue you need an active subscription to hbook.com.
Subscribe now to gain immediate access to everything hbook.com has to offer, as well as our highly searchable Guide/Reviews Database, which contains tens of thousands of short, critical reviews of books published in the United States for young people.
Thank you for registering. To have the latest stories delivered to your inbox, select as many free newsletters as you like below.
No thanks. Return to article
(2)
1-3
Illustrated by
Jon Klassen.
Badger is perfectly content to live alone in a brownstone owned by Aunt Lula, which he's arranged to suit his rather particular preferences, when a surprise roommate turns up. (It would have been less of a surprise had he not been too busy to read Aunt Lula's letters.) Skunk needs a home--"Not everyone wants a skunk"--but the impetuous and sometimes literally effusive Skunk's interference with scientist Badger's Important Rock Work just won't do. The personality pairing familiar to readers of Frog and Toad and the like should help ease the transition to this more challenging text, with its advanced vocabulary ("He'd shelved [the rocks and minerals] alphabetically with the most delicate specimens wrapped in tissue paper"), long paragraphs, and only occasionally interspersed illustrations. Those illustrations, some in black and white and some in warm color, echo the text's old-fashioned feel. This new series, with its humor and understated (well, sometimes) emotions, deserves a far warmer welcome than the one Skunk initially receives.
Reviewer: Shoshana Flax
| Horn Book Magazine Issue:
January, 2021