Balloon Toons: ADOPT A GLURB
Among the nonsense pet possibilities, the choice to take home a glurb (“You can buy glurb eggs for 10 cents at the monster shop”) offers both challenges and benefits. A glurb smells like rotten mustard but has a brain big enough to learn to read. They can also walk on the wall and the ceiling and even draw, though they do enjoy unrolling the toilet paper. Gravel’s simple handbook of glurb care will delight a young audience, both for its accessibility and the glurb’s resemblance to much younger (and, therefore, sillier in the emerging reader’s estimation) children. Although it’s more an illustrated book than a comic that requires the reader to “read” sequential images as well as text, the visual aspects of this title in the Balloon Toons line are pleasing and as humorous as the notion that glurbs and paper airplanes are a good mix. The handbook construction of the volume also offers early practice in understanding how information can be organized in a logical and useful way. Grades 1-3. --Francisca Goldsmith