Give Me Back My Bones!

by Kim Norman, Bob Kolar (Illustrator)

Overview

A silly pirate skeleton seeks to put its bones back together in this rhyming romp beneath the waves.
Cast a spyglass ’round here
while breakers curl and pound here.
There’s treasure to be found here —
I feel it in my bones!

A stormy night at sea has uncovered some long-buried secrets and surprises. Is that the mast of a shipwreck? A faded pirate hat? And what’s that hiding in the sand? A mandible and a clavicle, phalanges and femurs, a tibia and a fibula — could there be a set of bones scattered across the ocean floor? And who might they belong to? A jaunty rhyme takes readers on an underwater scavenger hunt as a comical skeleton tries to put itself back together piece by piece. Make no bones about it: this rollicking read-aloud will have young ones learning anatomy without even realizing it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781536210514
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	40
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Kim Norman is an artist, actress, and singer as well as the author of children’s books such as Puddle Pug and The Bot That Scott Built. Give Me Back My Bones! is her first book with Candlewick Press. She lives in Virginia.
Bob Kolar is the author-illustrator of many books, including Big Kicks. He is also the illustrator of Nothing Like a Puffin by Sue Soltis, the AlphaOops books by Alethea Kontis, and Slickety Quick: Poems about Sharks by Skila Brown. Bob Kolar lives in Missouri.

Editorial Reviews

Budding biologists as well as general fans of pirates, poetry, and wordplay will agree—and it makes a fuller (and less freighted) alternative to Bob Barner's Dem Bones (1996) and other versions of the old teaching spiritual. Both macabre and cheery—a rare treat.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

This clever, cumulative tale is enhanced by its endpapers, which feature scattered labelled bones at the front and a full skeleton at the back, and playful, dimly lit underwater digital illustrations populated by bug-eyed, curious fish. The rhyme keeps things moving despite the hefty vocabulary (Metacarpals! Phalanges!) and the illustrations make it clear what everything is. Somehow daffy and scholarly at once.
—Booklist Online

It’s a little morbid, but Kolar’s digital undersea illustrations are friendly, cartoony, and understated, with humerus, er, humorous details (i.e., a squid making off with the pirate’s radius, ulna, and belt) that are all about silliness.
—The Horn Book

From the Publisher

★ 2019-04-14
In a watery anatomy lesson, a pirate skeleton gathers up and reconnects its scattered bones.

As it goes, Norman's rollicking rhymes cleverly incorporate each major bone's common and formal names: "Collar me a collarbone, / the way-down-where-I-swaller bone, / a handy parrot-hauler bone— / I claim my clavicle." She tracks her skeletal buccaneer's sandy-bottom reassembly from skull to "fair phalanges." Sandwiched between visual keys on the endpapers (in separate pieces in the front and assembled and accoutered in the rear), Kolar scatters simplified but recognizable body parts (plus the requisite peg leg) across sea beds well-populated with colorful tropical fish and other marine denizens. Several of these pitch in to help before the narrative leaves the finished skeleton posing heroically atop a sunken ship with a spyglass clutched in its metacarpals: "There's treasure to be found here— / I feel it in my bones!" Budding biologists as well as general fans of pirates, poetry, and wordplay will agree—and it makes a fuller (and less freighted) alternative to Bob Barner's Dem Bones (1996) and other versions of the old teaching spiritual.

Both macabre and cheery—a rare treat. (Picture book. 6-8)

Kirkus Reviews