Liza Donnelly

This book is super cute! The language and sentences are simple like, “ Now don’t be scared. It’s only Halloween,” however, the illustrations are adorable. They are drawn in a cartoon-like manner and are very engaging for kids. I feel that a lot of children could connect to this book because the little boy dresses his dog up for Halloween, too! I know that when I was a child, I always wanted to dress my puppy up and bring her trick-or-treating with me. The boy and his dog decided to show more dress up as dinosaurs for Halloween but got made fun of for still trick-or-treating. I really appreciated that in the back of the book, the author included a glossary of types of dinosaurs for the children to read after the book is completed. The main message of this book was to do what makes you happy, and be happy with who you are. show less

A brutally funny collection of over 200 cartoons penned by The New Yorker’s cartooning couple, Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin, Cartoon Marriage is its authors’ candid celebration of twenty years of matrimony, in twelve chapters. Armed with wits shining like sharp knives—from “I Do?” to “Hearth Happenings,” and everything in between (“The Little Darlin’s,” “Ex-Whatevers,” “Obsessions and Possessions,” “Friends Furry,” and so on)—Donnelly and Maslin cut show more straight to the nature of desire (“It won’t work if I tell you what I want, because if I tell you what I want I won’t want it anymore”), and the order of romance (“I’d like you to consider changing your morning routine of patting me and kissing the dog goodbye”), with a pinch of self-mockery and a good dose of uproarious truth along the way.

While thoroughly gratifying the natural voyeur, the book is also must-have for historians of The New Yorker, who will appreciate the frequent references to fellow funnyfolk Richard Cline, Jack Ziegler, Mick Stevens, Peter Steiner, Roz Chast, and of course, the venerated James Thurber.
I also can’t help but mention Random House’s timely January ’09 release: Cartoon Marriage knocks every Valentine’s Day card out of the block.

[Review appearing in AboutTown TK.] show less

I would recommend this book to younger elementary students. This is a wordless book that goes through the story of a snow day and shows an adventure of trying to find dinosaurs buried in the snow, but they are just cars, bikes, and trash cans, except the last one was actually a dinosaur. This would be good in the classroom because it shows a fantasy story and is wordless so students can use their imagination to fill in the blanks of the story.

The concept is fun and the cartoons range from the eye-rollingly lame to the run-into-the-other-room-brandishing-the-book hilarious. There are a lot of "typical" New Yorker cartoons, of course. It's well worth picking up and leafing through, though I don't think I'd read it more than once.