A Cake for Herbie - Hardcover

Mathers, Petra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689830173 ISBN 13: 9780689830174

Publisher: Atheneum/Anne Schwartz Books, 2000

Synopsis

With the encouragement of his friend, Herbie spends days writing poems about food for a contest and although he does not win, he does find an appreciative audience. By the creator of Lottie's New Friend.

About this title

Review

In Lottie's New Beach Towel and Lottie's New Friend, Petra Mathers evokes the spirit of James Marshall's hippos George and Martha, celebrating the quiet joys of the friendship between Lottie the chicken and Herbie the duck with a feather-light touch.

In A Cake for Herbie, Herbie (the star of the third Herbie and Lottie book) decides to enter a poetry contest in which the winner literally takes the cake. Despite the fact that he stays up all night concocting poems about food from A to Z ("Artie chews, / Artie swallows, / Artichokes"), he is booed off the stage on the big night. This is especially "K ... for kruel" because Lottie is quite greenly sick and not there to comfort him. But all is not lost. Herbie, forlorn in the back alley, is soon ushered into a bustling restaurant kitchen where he and his delicious doggerel are welcomed by sweaty Betty (offering spaghetti) and a host of other shamelessly rhyming birds of a feather.

Herbie's new friends bake him a cake after all, and he can't wait to tell... Lottie! He zooms home along the now seemingly endless road, arriving with a mostly eaten cake and a story to share while she knits on the couch. Mathers's neatly boxed, crisply composed, colorful paintings each communicate a small story-within-a-story, richly deserving the close study of voracious young bookworms. If you haven't yet discovered this artist's sweet, funny world, now's the time to be introduced. (Ages 4 to 8) --Karin Snelson

About the Author

Dear Reader,

When I had lunch at the Ship's's Inn not long ago, I noticed some additions to the menu. Herbie's Pickled Artichokes looked particularly interesting. "Is this dish named after Herbie from Crook Road?" I asked.

"Might be," said the waitress. "All I know is that he's from across the bridge, and he's the greatest poet. Oh, you should've heard him," she went on, "poems all the way from A to Z. It was a night to remember."

After I found out the whole story I thought so too, and wrote it all down for you.

Until next time,
Petra

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum/Anne Schwartz Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0689830173
• ISBN 13: 9780689830174
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Mathers Petra