Who Made This Cake? - Hardcover

Nakagawa, Chihiro

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1590785959 ISBN 13: 9781590785959

Publisher: Front Street, Incorporated, 2008

Synopsis

Little people use BIG machines to make a GIANT birthday cake! Imagine an industrialized Lilliput. Imagine today. Imagine an enormous construction site. Imagine a birthday cake like no other. What if the people you order your next birthday cake from are tiny, and what if they build cakes the way we build buildings? Tractor-trailers and giant cranes, catwalks, and helicopters. Hundreds of workers. Never have you seen such a construction site in this Horn Book Fanfare Award winner!

About this title

About the Author

Chihiro Nakagawa is the author and illustrator of many picture books, including Nohara-Hime (Princess of the Field) and Tenshi-no-Kaikata (How to Take Care of an Angel), which won the Readers' Choice Prize of Nihon Ehon Shou (Japan Picture Book Award). She also translates Japanese picture books into English. She lives in Saitama, Japan.

Junji Koyose graduated from Setsu Mode Seminar, a private art school. He designs books and illustrates for various magazines, including special enthusiast magazines about motorbikes and cars. Who Made This Cake? is his first picture book. He lives in Kanagawa, Japan.

Reviews

PreSchool-Grade 2—This story begins before the title page, as a worker takes an order over the phone. As the tale progresses, a miniature construction crew uses various vehicles to assemble cooking ingredients, mix a batter, pour it into a pan, load it into an oven, and then ice the final product: a birthday cake. Nakagawa's text employs an economy of words and simple sentences to supplement Koyose's detailed artwork, which is the heart of the book. Done in black ink lines and bright colors, the illustrations bustle with tiny workers wearing hard hats and matching boots. The ending shows a mother presenting the human-size cake to her child. This delightful picture book will be popular with fans of construction stories and makes a good choice for one-on-one sharing.—Lynn K. Vanca, Akron-Summit County Public Library, Richfield, OH
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In this picture book’s framework story, a woman orders a cake on the title page and, in the end, presents it to her son for his birthday. The real action happens in between, though, as a team of tiny cake-construction workers uses some serious-looking miniature equipment, including dump trucks and cranes fitted with mixing whips. Even cracking an egg is a challenging engineering feat for people who are barely as tall as the yolk. The activities of these cheerful little folk will fascinate young children, especially those enthralled by Legos and the like. The minimal text (usually one sentence per double-page spread) consists of comments such as “Pour the mixture in the pan. / Load it in the oven. / Press the button, and let’s take a break. / Mmmm, it smells good! WATCH OUT!” The pleasing artwork features precise ink drawings, tinted with bright colors that glow against clean, white backgrounds. It’s the visual storytelling here that is most absorbing. Preschool-Grade 1. --Carolyn Phelan

Edition details

• Publisher: Front Street, Incorporated
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1590785959
• ISBN 13: 9781590785959
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Koyose Junji
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 32