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Library | Call Number | Status |
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Searching... Bayport Public Library | EASY SIS | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
While taking a bath, a young boy is joined by all sorts of dinosaurs.
Author Notes
Peter Sis was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1949 and attended the Academy of Applied Arts in Prague and the Royal College of Art in London. He began his career as a filmmaker and won the Golden Bear Award at the 1980 West Berlin Film Festival for an animated short. He has also won the Grand Prix Toronto and the Cine Golden Eagle Award, and in 1983 collaborated with Bob Dylan on You Got to Serve Somebody. His film work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
In 1982 Sis was sent to Los Angeles to produce a film for the 1984 Winter Olympics. But the film project was canceled when Czechoslovakia and the entire Eastern bloc decided to boycott the Olympics. Ordered by his government to return home, Sis decided to stay in the United States and was granted asylum. Sis then met Maurice Sendak who introduced him to children's books, and he moved to New York City in 1984 to begin a career in children's literature.
Sís earned quick acclaim with the publication of the 1986 Newbery Medal Winner, The Whipping Boy by Sid Fleishman, for which he did the illustrations. Sis is a five-time winner of The New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year.. Komodo! and A Small Tall Tale from the Far Far North were each named a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award Honor Book, and he has won a Society of Illustrators Gold Medal for Komodo! and a Silver Medal for The Three Golden Keys. Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei was a 1997 Caldecott Honor Book, as was Tibet Through the Red Box. Sis has also received a MacArthur Fellowship
Sis' editorial illustrations have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines in the United States and abroad. He has published nearly 1,000 drawings in The New York Times Book Review. He has designed many book jackets and posters, including, in 1984, the famous poster for Milos Forman's Academy Award-winning motion picture Amadeus. He has also completed a mural for the Washington/Baltimore Airport, a poster for the New York City subway system, and a stage set for the Joffrey Ballet. His work has been exhibited in Prague, London, Zurich, Hamburg, Los Angeles, and New York in both group and one-man shows.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-K-A wordless picture book that takes readers on a wild adventure of the imagination. A boy and his toy dinosaur are in the tub when a larger dinosaur appears, and then another, and as the beasts loom larger, the boy and his surroundings become smaller. The culmination is a three-page spread revealing a full-color herd of dinosaurs racing across the page, and if children look very closely, they'll see a tiny boy in his tub. Then, magically, the oversized creatures disappear, and all that are left are the boy and his bath toy and his mother, who appears with a towel. This imaginative story with wonderful endpapers naming the creatures should appeal to all young dinosaur lovers. S's's barely fleshed-out, cookie-cutter cartoons tell the story. He masterfully plays with white space and perspective, conveys action, and captures a full range of emotions with the absolute minimum of line and detail. As in Fire Trucks (1998) and Trucks, Trucks, Trucks (1999, both Greenwillow), the author's bold artwork and simple plot are right on the mark for this audience.-JoAnn Jonas, Carlsbad City Library, San Diego, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Horn Book Review
(Preschool) In the toddler-friendly format he used most recently in Ship Ahoy! [rev. 9/99], Sfs again explores the mutable boundary between a child's imaginative life and his everyday world. The first spread of this wordless book depicts a small boy-a toy dinosaur in hand, a trail of clothing behind him-contemplating a full bathtub. No sooner is he immersed than a large head, much resembling his toy's, emerges from the water. Another appears over his shoulder; then a dozen more dinosaurs appear, growing larger as they come. The visual climax of the fantasy parallels Dorothy's arrival in Oz: the creatures are suddenly transmogrified from flat, boldly outlined figures resembling plastic toys into corpulent, modeled, and cross-hatched beasts in a desert landscape featuring active volcanoes. The boy, whose expression has gone from surprise to fear to wonder, now observes from a tiny, tub-shaped pool in their midst. But he's all smiles in the last spread, waving goodbye to a final departing tail while Mom, back in the real world, rushes in to whisk him from an overflowing tub. From the first symmetrical view of the boy pausing on the brink of his serene, oval tub, an innocent eager to discover a new world, to a last vignette where, clean and calm, he's wrapped warm in his towel (still clutching his toy), the book mirrors the satisfactions of the imaginative play that can carry a child to the limits of time and space and bring him home with no more ill effects than bath water splashed on the floor. As a final touch for budding scientists who like to know the right names for things, the dinosaurs are identified on the endpapers. j.r.l. (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Ages 3^-5. As in last year's Trucks Trucks Trucks, Sis once again paints everyday adventures that are turned fantastic by a boy's imagination. In simple line drawings, the wordless story begins when a boy hops into the tub with his toy dinosaur. An ominous, blue snout slowly emerges from the bath water and mayhem breaks loose--one dinosaur turns into two, three, and more; the bathtub melts into a prehistoric pond; and the boy is suddenly in an ancient desert, with a crowd of beautifully detailed dinos thundering across a foldout spread. Detail gives way to line drawing again, and the boy stands happily in the tub, the last dino tail nearly off the left page, as an anxious mother runs with a towel to the scene. As in his earlier titles, Sis shows a pitch-perfect understanding of the blur between the real and the imagined in children's play. Endpapers printed with a guide to dinosaur species will entertain fans. --Gillian Engberg
