Horn Book
. . . surprisingly fresh, and genuinely funny.
Elizabeth Ward
If there is a more inventive duo at work in the picture-book field than Scieszka and Smith, co-creators of such gems as The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs!, I can't name it. The pair strikes gold again with this portrait in seven scenes of a very odd friendship. Not that kids will think a cowboy befriending an octopus is odd. That's the way they play.
—The Washington Post
School Library Journal
Gr 1-5
Picture-book readers meet an unlikely pair of friends here: a refined octopus and a cowboy who is a little rough around the edges. The two are actually paper cutouts: the title page reveals that Cowboy has been snipped from a Western Heroes paper-doll book and Octopus from a comic strip. Seven hilarious short stories are presented, beginning with the origin of the friendship, in which Cowboy is confused about a teeter-totter that doesn't seem to work until Octopus "repairs" it by sitting on the opposite end, and concluding with the pair gazing into the sunset of a picture postcard. All of the vignettes are silly and perfectly absurd; Scieszka captures a childlike dialogic cadence and ends the pieces with the sudden, agreeable solutions to problems that kids often come up with. Incorporating mid-20th-century illustrations, graphic art, newspaper clippings, and toys, the collage and mixed-media artwork perfectly matches the wacky text. The colors are slightly muted and the paper appears to have yellowed with age. The delightful paper protagonists never change poses, though Smith occasionally dresses them in zany paper hats and silly costumes, and their static nature adds to the humor. Share this title with devotees of Scieszka's and Smith's other collaborations and with fans of Mini Grey's Traction Man Is Here! (Knopf, 2005). Cowboy and Octopus prove that we all get by with a little help from our friends.
—Shawn BrommerCopyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
