Chicken Cheeks
Written by Michael Ian Black
Illustrated by Kevin Hawkes
Simon & Schuster
ISBN 978-1-4169-4864-3
Some bears will go to any length to get some honey. This one recruits every animal that comes along. Readers will giggle with delight at the bird's eye view of this back-sided journey up the tree.
Awards
New York Public Library 100 Titles for Reading and Sharing
Silver Medal Society of Illustrators Children’s Book Show
Utah Beehive Award Master List
NCTE Notable Children's Books in the Language Arts
Reviews
“Pictures tell the story, with minimal text adding humor with rhyme, alliterations and clever wordplay. No butts about it, this is a perfect collaboration of text and illustration.”
Kirkus - starred review
“Primary grade youngsters will find Kevin Hawkes’ illustrations a stitch.”
Roundtable for Kids
“Hawkes's cast runs the gamut of goofy expressions; this smorgasbord of demeanors, coupled with the sheer improbability of the tower, make this a surefire crowd pleaser. The tower is finally undone by the stinger on a bumblebee, but not before readers' vocabularies have been boosted by 16 ways to refer to buttocks. And if that's not an example of literature enriching our lives, what is?”
Publisher’s Weekly
Insider's Scoop
I did the research for this book by visiting zoos and trying to get animals to turn away from me so I could draw their behinds. That made for some funny moments! One of the animals I didn’t see was the moose. It wasn’t until later that I visited a wild animal park in my home state of Maine and discovered to my chagrin that moose do not actually have little floppy tails like the one I painted in Chicken Cheeks. Oops!!
