Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 08/01/2018 The first day of school is coming, and Penelope, an orange T. rex with the air of a squishy stuffed animal, is nervous about making friends. But her lunch of 300 sandwiches is packed, and her backpack, featuring delicious ponies, is ready to go. Sensing a theme? Penelope thinks with her stomach—a trait that gets her into trouble when she discovers that her classroom is populated entirely by tasty, tasty children. Penelope promptly eats them all. She spits them out, but it’s a little hard to make friends after that. Her dad tries to explain why people don’t like being eaten, but it’s not until Penelope makes a lonely attempt to befriend the classroom goldfish that she truly understands. The students in Penelope’s class are diverse in skin tone and background: one student wears a hijab, another a yarmulke, and one, of course, is a dinosaur. Despite all the chomping, the bright colors and deceptively adorable dinosaurs make this a fun read rather than a scary one, with a hidden lesson about boundaries. Too much fun for a single read. - Copyright 2018 Booklist.

School Library Journal - 08/01/2018 PreS-Gr 1–Making mistakes is difficult, but maybe it's the best way to learn. Readers can tell from the first page that Penelope, a T-rex, is going to learn a lot at her school, where she is the only dinosaur and the other students are human. Then, "…she ate them. Because children are delicious." Mrs Noodleman insists that she "spit them out at once!" The days pass, and Penelope really tries, but the children are afraid of her. "Mrs. Noodleman, Penelope ate William Omoto again!,'" a classmate calls out. Walter the goldfish, the class pet, is not afraid, and he gives the little T-rex some of her own medicine—a chomp on the finger. "Once Penelope found out what it was like to be someone's snack, she lost her appetite for children." The narrative is simple, straightforward, and hysterical. Higgins's illustrations in graphite, ink, and Photoshop are bold and cartoonish with plenty of silly touches—a single sneaker hanging by its lace from Penelope's mouth, the slime-covered classmates that Penelope spits out at her teacher's command, the T-rex at the bottom of the slide with her mouth a wide-open cave for the next comer will all garner a laugh. VERDICT For the times when students struggle to understand one another and when impulse control needs a little strengthening, pair this winner with Mo Willems's Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct. An appealing read-aloud selection.—Lisa Lehmuller, Paul Cuffee Maritime Charter School, Providence - Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.