Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0742/2006025289-b.html
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Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestselling book that celebrates love and hugs--from beloved MUTTS cartoonist and Caldecott honor-winning artist Patrick McDonnell!
There was once a kitten so filled with love he wanted to give the whole world a hug! Jules the kitten (also known in the MUTTS cartoons as "Shtinky Puddin'") knows that hugs can make the world a better place. So he makes a "Hug To-Do List"--with the endangered species of the world at the top--and travels the globe to show all of the animals that someone cares. From Africa to the North Pole to his own back yard, Jules proves a hug is the simplest--but kindest--gift we can give. With its gently environmental theme, this joyous rhyming story about sharing love is an ideal gift year-round.
Author Notes
Patrick McDonnell is the author and illustrator of Tek: The Modern Cave Boy , Thank You and Good Night , A Perfectly Messed-Up Story , The Monsters' Monster , and Me...Jane , a Caldecott Honor Book. He is also the creator of the internationally syndicated comic strip Mutts, which inspired his picture books The Gift of Nothing , Hug Time , and others. He lives in New Jersey.
Reviews (4)
School Library Journal Review
PreS-K-Jules the kitten is so full of love that he wants to hug the whole world. Starting with his best friends, he expands his endeavor to cover the neighborhood and the park, and then journeys to other countries to embrace animals both familiar and exotic. After he himself is hugged by a polar bear, he heads home to bed. Jules, together with the friends who appear briefly, will be familiar to fans of the syndicated comic strip "Mutts," and the energetic, sketchy illustrations seem even more expressive and dynamic in the midst of warm buff background pages. Trying to hug a blue whale or an elephant, this small kitten (with his big red nose) is irresistible without ever crossing the line into saccharine. Unfortunately, the same is not true of the text, which is very simple and focuses only on one idea: hugs. The narrative soon becomes repetitive, and the rhyming verses are sometimes forced, as in "Exploring the rain forest by foot and canoe,/Jules discovered a species brand-new." Still, this book, with its tiny size and small-scale illustrations, might be enjoyed by youngsters when shared one-on-one.-Marian Drabkin, Richmond Public Library, CA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
McDonnell (Just Like Heaven), creator of the comic strip Mutts, has a fan base that will greet this book with open arms. The strip's hero, the cat Jules, sets out to hug one of every sort of animal in the world. This large goal is made less overwhelming by the book's diminutive trim size and the conviction on Jules's tiny, wide-eyed face (famous for his big red honker). McDonnell's previous books had sparer palettes; this one combines warm, cream pages with pastel ink-and-watercolor vignettes to pleasing effect. Double-page spreads of snowy Arctic expanses under a moonlit turquoise sky provide a tense moment ("But at the North Pole, Jules sadly found/ What it would be like with no one around"). The artist quickly dispels the audience's concern, because as Jules starts to sniff, a polar bear offers him a hug. Meter and rhyme wobble a bit ("There once was a kitten so filled with love,/ He wanted to give the whole world a hug"), but the sentiment seems to come from the heart. McDonnell's carefully mixed gouaches and his able draftsmanship-the rarer the animal, the less likely he is to resort to caricature-hint at newly revealed talents. Ages 3-6. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Jules (aka Shtinky Puddin') finally gets his own picture-book platform to preach his environmentally friendly, endangered-species-loving message. In the pale colors of a Mutts Sunday comic strip, Jules the orange kitten sets out with a mission: to hug the whole world. "He hugged his best friends, Mooch, Noodles, and Earl, / A butterfly, buttercups, a little gray squirrel." He works his way around the globe hugging chimps, pandas and wombats until he finds himself alone at the North Pole. After accepting an offered hug from a passing polar bear, Jules hurries home to hug the one he loves best: Doozy. Fans of the first two picture books featuring the Mutts crew will find this no less charming, though the message here is a bit more heavily laid on. The illustrations are the greatest strength here; and, like its predecessors, this would be a fine gift or story-time choice. (Picture book. 5-7) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE illustrator Guy Billout works the narrow but fertile territory where clarity intersects with mystery. It's a place where the graffiti might read "René Magritte Was Here (de Chirico, Too)" but Billout's concerns are his own: his drawings (or are they paintings? or both?) often employ tricks of scale and perspective, along with large expanses of deceptively flat color, compositions that resolve in witty visual jokes while tapping deeper currents of unease. They're bright, figuratively and literally, like dreams dreamt under a noonday desert sun rather than in the usual shape-shifting murk. Billout is perhaps best known for his long association with The Atlantic Monthly, but he also makes regular visits to the Book Review's list of each year's 10 best illustrated books for children. "The Frog Who Wanted to See the Sea" is his latest picture book, and it's lovely, with folk tale overtones and illustrations kids and adults can lose themselves in. (Isn't that what we really want from a picture book - a low-tech virtual-reality experience?) Our heroine is Alice, a little green frog who is growing restless within the confines of her small pond: "Alice knew every inch of the pond's murky bottom and every hiding place among the reeds. She knew, too, that she could swim from one side to the other with 28 kicks of her back legs." Spurred by a loquacious sea gull, Alice gets it into her head to leave home, taking only a rolled-up lily pad - great detail - to venture forth and see the ocean. A quest narrative, as they say. The psychological hook for young children (or midlife parents) is obvious. Fortunately, Billout, whose writing is as disciplined as his artwork, doesn't drive home the point with a nail gun in the manner of, say, Katzenberg-era Disney animation. Instead his story unfolds simply, with grace, nuance and high style. I particularly loved his description of Alice's first sighting of the ocean, which comes after a troubled sleep adrift on her pad: "When Alice awoke the next morning, all she could see was blue. She looked in every direction for green riverbanks. In a moment of both joy and fright, she realized that she had reached the sea. Alice croaked softly. ... The only reply was a gust of wind that blew across the surface of the water." The hook here - the lostness - is again compelling, and the illustration, of Alice riding a wave that honors Billout's debt to traditional Japanese printmaking, is a thing of subtle beauty. But it's that "moment of both joy and fright" that really gets me. Beyond encouraging "feelings," how many children's books bother with that kind of emotional duality, let alone conflict? While Alice eventually makes it back to her pond safe, sound and as waterlogged as an amphibian would want to be, the moral of her story won't be "There's no place like home." Billout understands that most of his readers, or listeners, will continue to find the wider world beguiling, as they should, and his book ends with an outward-bound coda that small children may find both unsettling and alluring - and funny. He knows exactly how to challenge them, a talent less obvious than his draftsmanship but no less remarkable. Patrick McDonnell's "Hug Time" shares the strengths and weaknesses of his syndicated comic strip, "Mutts." Depending on your taste for pet humor and warm puppies, you may find the strip a wee bit cloying, or you may find it sweet and heartfelt. Either way, you can't fail to be charmed by the drawings themselves, unless maybe you just hate comics. (What's wrong with you?) McDonnell is a student of George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," but the cartoonist he really puts me in mind of is Charles M. Schulz. Like Schulz at the height of his powers, McDonnell is an expressionist in minimalist's clothing when it conies to character: both can evoke volleys of emotion with only a scant graphic arsenal of well-placed dots and short, perfectly etched lines. But if Schulz's great subjects were angst, frustration and self-loathing, McDonnell traffics in cozier fare. "Hug Time" stars Jules, a kitten character from "Mutts." Told in loosely rhymed, loosely scanned verse, the story begins: "There once was a kitten so filled with love/He wanted to give the whole world a hug." And so he does: Jules travels the globe to hug, among others, a chimpanzee, a giraffe, a gnu, a panda, a wombat and a humuhumu fish (fun to read aloud, whether you know how to pronounce it or not). I'll give away the ending: "The world is so big .../And yet so small,/It's time that we embrace it all. / That's something that we all can do. / Start with the one who's closest to you." Hard to argue with that if you're a 4-year-old, or the parent of one, however much the cynic in either of you might want to. Hard also to argue with McDonnell's sublime drawing of teeny Jules just managing to hug the chin of a huge, very content blue whale - the whale might be purring - or his evocation of a starry night sky with a Jackson Pollock vocabulary of blots and drips. Simple but effective, like the book itself. Brace Handy is a writer and deputy editor at Vanity Fair.