My Best Friend is as Sharp as a Pencil

May 10, 2010
This book’s narrator, sketched in charcoal, uses objects and similes to illustrate her answers to her grandmother’s questions about school. Mrs. Sheila, the librarian, is as “interesting as a book full of stories. When she reads them, her eyes shine like marbles.” There’s a photograph included for each object, and on the next page, Mrs. Sheila’s portrait is enhanced with the objects used to describe her (her eyes are indeed marbles). Other portraits include “Sofia (the wildest girl in my class),” whose smile is made from a string of jingle bells, and Mildred, the class turtle. Like its predecessor, My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks, this is a gleeful fusion of collage and figurative language. Ages 4–8.

April 1, 2010
Gr 2-4-When a girl's grandmother comes to visit, she is filled with questions about the child's teachers, friends, and school. Instead of simply answering, the girl decides to show her grandmother what she likes about the important people in her life. She gathers up piles of objects and then sorts through them to find representative objects and collages them into portraits. The girl's friend Jack, who is geographically inclined and "sharp as a pencil," ends up having globes for eyes, magnifying glasses for glasses, a microscope nose, and a pencil mouth. Her art teacher has an artist's palette for a face, wears mysterious dark glasses, sports a colorful Mohawk, and wields a paintbrush. The layout encourages a guessing game of sorts as the audience will wonder how and where each object will be incorporated in the portrait. This book is ideal for projects involving descriptive language. Readers can create their own portraits of friends and teachers using various objects and this book as a guide. Use it with Piven's "What Presidents Are Made of" (2004), "What Athletes Are Made of" (2006, both S & S), and "My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks" (Randon, 2007) for classroom or crafting activities."Stacy Dillon, LREI, New York City"

Copyright 2010 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2010
Grades K-3 This engaging book is similar to Pivens My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks and Other Funny Family Portraits (2007). Vibrant portraits in words and realia-collage illustrations, purportedly created by the child narrator in anticipation of her grandmothers inevitable questions about school, will delight readers. One double-page spread gives each new characters traits, expressed in several verbal metaphors (e.g., as jumpy as a million rubber bands) and in photos of objects (such as 8 colored rubber bands). On the next spread, a painting incorporating those objects forms an eye-catching, idiosyncratic portrait.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)