I'm Not
S&W • Random House, 2010

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2011

A timid, brown gator wearing a pink bow recounts all the things that her friend Evelyn, a bouncy, green gator, is where she is not: decorator, circus performer, explorer and snappy dresser (Evelyn wears Band-Aids with pearls!). “If Evelyn was a book, you’d read her all night under the covers to see what happened next.” Halfway through the story, their roles are reversed when the shy narrator claims all the things she can do and Evelyn can’t. The gator colors of brown and green cleverly contrasts their differences. The title page and bio blurbs typify the playfulness: “Not drawn by Pam Smallcomb; not written by Robert Weinstock.” These and other small details in the illustrations and the teeny print in Evelyn’s speech balloons make this hilarious. The droll artwork is “not rendered in watercolor or woodcut” but is subtle, terrific fun with James Marshall–like charm. This is not a stale but a fresh take on friendship/reassurance stories and is, for sure, not boring. —Kirkus (starred review)

Smallcomb's spare text lets Weinstock run wild, as when Evelyn dresses up as the "Queen of England," wearing an orange rubber glove crown and carrying a toilet-plunger scepter… The theme of respect for diverse talents and personalities comes through without a trace of didacticism in this entertaining, very funny story. —Publishers Weekly

Can You Dig It?
Disney • Hyperion, 2010

Not so much an archeology lesson (though Great-Aunt LuAnn Abrue does enjoy finding "fossil poo") but rather poetic musings on how dinosaurs and cavemen really lived. Weinstock's boisterous rhymes, along with his lumpy dinosaurs and dumpy cavemen, galumph through the pages. The mostly one-poem-per-page format is enlivened by double-page spreads in which one side frequently "talks" to the other, as when a grouchy museum guard tells a child not to embrace a dino skeleton in "Hugs" while on the next page the guard can be seen smooching a skull after hours in "Kisses." Sly whispers from supporting characters-and a sneaky, smiling worm found on each page-are fun to spot in the darkened yet brimming illustrations. A prehistoric romp for the ages. —Kirkus

The poems in this entertaining collection focus on paleontologists, dinosaurs, and stone age people with a whimsical emphasis on humor. Like Jack Prelutsky’s work, Weinstock’s poems are filled with slapstick and outré subversiveness. —Publishers Weekly

Food Hates You, Too
Disney • Hyperion, 2009

This hilarious collection of poems about food stretches the imagination and vocabulary. Young picky eaters are confronted in the title poem with the possibility that “If cotton candy, apple pie,/And French fries looked at you/And said, ‘Gross! Blecchh! Nope, I won’t try./I’ll never like it. Ew!’” kids would say, “‘Hey! That’s no fair!/Give me a chance!’” Varying in length and form (four lines to a sonnet to a two-page poem), the poetry is fresh, funny, and challenging, including words like “pernicious,” “prehensile,” “unminced,” and “blanched.” Full-color and sometimes delightfully bizarre mixed-media illustrations offer clever asides (“Nuts!” declares a nut, and “Pea brain” announces a pea), goofy perspectives (from inside a mouth, for example), and amusing visual scenarios. In “Mom,” readers might laugh out loud at the re-created scene from Goodnight, Moon, this one featuring praying mantids: “I ate your father. Yes, it’s true./That’s what we praying mantids do./His last words to me were ‘Adieu./If only I could eat you, too.’” This is a winner that kids will love. —School Library Journal

Addressing picky eaters of all ages and continuing to empower food the way he did in his Giant Meatball (2008), Weinstock offers a set of verses that are often as stomach-churning as they are hilarious.... Definitely, as the closing poem puts it, "Food For Thought." —Kirkus

Giant Meatball
harcourt, 2008
A Junior Library Guild
Premier Selection

In the fine tradition of stories featuring oversized food, here's a cautionary tale about a narcissistic meatball who comes to a bad and sudden end. So full of himself is the boulder-sized 'ball bounding destructively through pastures, gardens and streets that he ignores the farmer's bleats of protest, the marmalade-maker's boiling fury and even—kiss of death—the librarian's furious shushing.... Yum. —Kirkus

Gordimer Byrd's Reminder
harcourt, 2004

With understated humor and off-beat characters, newcomer Weinstock introduces Gordimer, a plump everybird who works in the "Atlas Thimble Co. Manufactory," miserably punching dimples in thimbles with his beak. Like Steig's Sylvester, Gordimer finds a "magic pebble," but as the droll narrator muses, "having a magic pebble was one thing. Getting the magic out of it was an entirely different can of worms." Inventive and eccentric compositions in muted seagreens and pastel blues picture Gordimer trying various comical ploys until he finally concludes, "This was no magic pebble." Readers then discover the hero has a closet full of "magic" twigs, strings, beans and the like. Soon after, he gathers the sundry items to build a "reminder," that he "could no longer believe in magic things." But he discovers in the process that creating something and sharing it with a friend is what gives him pleasure... Weinstock's sly humor and understated wit stand out in this promising debut, and mark him as a talent to watch. —Publishers Weekly

Delicate, pale pictures and finely crafted language show an offbeat life tinged with sadness... A quiet treasure for a quiet reader. —Kirkus