It’s a factual face-off in this superhero picture book from all-star Peter Catalanotto.Question Boy wants answers. He lives for them. But none of the town’s action heroes—Oil Man, Paperboy, Police Woman—can satisfy Question Boy’s heroic need to
know!
Enter Little Miss Know-It-All. She has an answer for every who-what-where-when-and-how…and what she doesn’t know she simply makes up.
And what about you? Ready for a wrangle? Keen on a quibble? Then come along to the town park to cheer the two of them on! Vibrant, rich illustrations merge fantasy with reality in this exploration of questions, answers, and what it means to be right.
A curious boy with non-stop questions meets a girl who seems to know all the answers. Illustrations.
Question Boy Meets
Little Miss Know-It-All by Peter Catalanotto;
illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary Jackson/Atheneum 40 pp.
2/12 978-1-4424-0670-4 $16.99
Young children do seem to have a superhuman capacity for interrogation. Catalanotto takes this concept and flies with it to create his intrepid caped crusader for whom no question is too daunting or trivial to ask. Patrolling a residential neighborhood, rendered in verdant sun-drenched watercolors, Question Boy takes on and bests one costumed everyday hero after another. For example, while Garbage Man (bedecked in head-to-toe spandex with a giant red
G on his chest) is “busy freeing the city of filth and rubbish,” QB fires increasingly impossible queries at him—“How much stuff can you fit in your truck?” “More than an elephant?” “Can you fit a whale in there?”—until the outmatched sanitation engineer has no choice but to flee. Obviously, parents of young children will identify with his plight—and the plight of Police Woman, Mechanic Man, Wonder Waitress, etc.—but, happily, the book’s humor is not adults-only. The caricatured scenarios build to an absurdist height when from the depths of the park comes, finally, a worthy opponent who has all the answers and then some. When Question Boy and the tiara-and-tutu-clad Little Miss Know-It-All face off against each other, it’s the most satisfying showdown since…well, there really is no comparison.
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The Horn Book, March/April 2012
