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CM . . .
. Volume XXIV Number 24. . . .February 23, 2018
Excerpt:
Kristi goes fishing with her father and falls into the ocean, but when her father hauls her out, she is holding onto a huge fish! So her father tosses her back in to catch another one. When they get back to the dock, Kristi's mother is shocked that the father threw Kristi into the ocean; the mother then tosses HIM into the ocean to catch a big fish, and everyone else goes to share a big fish dinner. The next day, of course, everyone goes fishing.
Highly Recommended. Saeyong Kim, who has an MA in Children's Literature and an MLIS, lives in British Columbia, where she works as an auxiliary public librarian.
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Get Me Another One! reads like a well polished tale from a storyteller's bag of favorites; as can be seen from the excerpts above, and even the very mundane conversation that starts off the story has a quality of performance, a suggestion of loud body language and exaggerated facial expressions; the book almost reads itself. The text is clearly designed for reading aloud (and loudly), as can be seen in the description of the boat moving up and down with the waves, making Kristi sick. The simple story and the excitement of kids and dads being tossed hither and thither make Get Me Another One! an excellent book for storytime with a group of children of mixed ages or for a multigenerational (or a multilingual) family storytime.
Boldt's illustrations are a perfect match for the text, being as bold, boisterous, exuberant, joyful, and loud as the words are. There is an emphasis on movement and on faces, with the focus zooming in on dynamic moments framed by sky or sea. The openness of the background emphasizes the energy of the activity (diving, lurching, pulling, or throwing) while allowing the page to feel spacious and uncrowded. The happy energy in the illustrations dispels a good deal of that slightly dangerous sense of unpredictability within the text, something which those readers who sympathize with Kristi's mother will surely have felt.