One Mean Ant with Fly and Flea

by Arthur Yorinks, Sergio Ruzzier (Illustrator)

Overview

In a sidesplitting sequel to One Mean Ant, comedic masters Arthur Yorinks and Sergio Ruzzier set loose a fugitive from the flea circus.

Ant and Fly are back! And this time they’re joined by Flea, newly escaped from the flea circus. Our mean Ant, the meanest ant there ever was, doesn’t think much of the tiny, annoying Flea, until Flea’s wits get them out of one sticky situation and . . . straight into another. Ant’s famous temper can’t save them now. The bugs are truly stuck with one another! Author Arthur Yorinks and illustrator Sergio Ruzzier return for the second story in a planned trilogy that introduces a new insect in each book. Picking up where the last tale left off, the text crackles with snappy banter and silly wordplay, while expressive illustrations capture all the entomological action. At heart an ode to the small but mighty, this zany sequel will deliver big laughs for the read-aloud crowd.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763683955
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	10/13/2020
Series:	One Mean Ant
Pages:	48
Sales rank:	704,830
Product dimensions:	7.75(w) x 10.45(h) x 0.44(d)
Age Range:	3 - 7 Years

About the Author

Arthur Yorinks is a playwright, director, and author of more than thirty-five picture books for children, including One Mean Ant, illustrated by Sergio Ruzzier; Caldecott Medal winner Hey, Al, illustrated by Richard Egielski; and Presto and Zesto in Limboland, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. Arthur Yorinks lives in Cambridge, New York.

Sergio Ruzzier was a 2011 Maurice Sendak Fellow and is the illustrator of One Mean Ant. His books have received many awards, including Parents’ Choice Gold Awards for This Is Not a Picture Book! and The Room of Wonders. He splits his time between New York and the northern Italian hills.

Editorial Reviews

Ruzzier returns to the same pastel hues of the first book and nails the characters’ expressive faces and body language. A cliffhanger wraps up the story, one that perhaps will resolve itself in the final book of the trilogy. Entertaining, especially for fans of wordplay.
—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2020-06-30
The irritable ant and amiable fly introduced in One Mean Ant (2020) return, and this time they meet someone new.

As the book opens, the two are stuck in a spider web, their lives in danger. The fly panics but then spots a “spot” in the web. It’s a flea-circus escapee who is so skilled in acrobatics that his jumping releases all three from the web. The fly and the flea are injured, so the ant must pull them on a leaf by a strand of the spider’s web in order to leave the scene. Unfortunately, Big Jim—of Jim’s Flea Circus—scoops them up (only his pale hand is featured) and forces them to perform. Much of the book’s humor comes from the characters’ banter (when the ant uses idioms, the fly takes them literally, as when he asks the fly to “face the music” and the fly responds with “I don’t hear any music”) and wordplay (a stretch of dialogue in which the characters discuss how the flea “fled the flea circus” undoes the ant but will have readers giggling). There’s also inherent comedy in the duo’s Abbott and Costello–like repartee, with the cantankerous ant as the straight man—er, bug—and the fly as the dimwitted joker. Ruzzier returns to the same pastel hues of the first book and nails the characters’ expressive faces and body language. A cliffhanger wraps up the story, one that perhaps will resolve itself in the final book of the trilogy.

Entertaining, especially for fans of wordplay. (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews

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