ALA Booklist (Wed Jun 01 00:00:00 CDT 2016)

Penny's mom works for the mysterious POTUS, and today Penny gets to go with her to work! Penny's lively imagination paints POTUS as a big, blue, friendly monster of the Sendak variety. POTUS, Penny imagines, must be important and exciting e just can't wait for the fun they'll have together. But Penny's mom is too busy to introduce her to POTUS right away, so Penny sneaks off through the White House to search, though no one she meets (the butler, the gardener) seems to know POTUS' location. Eventually Penny finds POTUS and receives a shock: POTUS isn't a monster, but rather a bespectacled human woman. Manwill's colorful Disney-style art is dynamic, familiar, and appealing. Ruiz assumes, probably correctly, that young readers aren't familiar with the POTUS acronym, though it's a bit of a stretch that Penny wouldn't know her mom's boss. However, the humor, imagination, and art more than make up for that, and the fact that Penny's surprise isn't about the president being a woman is a sly and winning detail.

Horn Book (Tue Aug 01 00:00:00 CDT 2017)

One day Penny goes to work with her mother in a "big white house" and resolves to meet her mom's boss, the elusive POTUS. That Penny imagines POTUS as a big, furry blue monster in a suit in the colorful illustrations is endearing despite its implausibility. A surprise ending elevates a story that probably won't outlast the recent political conversation.

Kirkus Reviews

A common political acronym is decoded when a young girl accompanies her mother to her White House job and meets the mysterious "POTUS."Penny is a bright and curious little brown-skinned girl, but she's lacking one crucial bit of information about her mother's boss: who is POTUS, and what kind of weird monster must it be? Penny spends a chunk of the day imagining a blue-furred, horned creature with its own plane and a team of tentacled secret agents. When Penny goes wandering, she finally runs into POTUS, a bespectacled white woman with brown hair. After all her speculation, the girl is surprised not that the president of the United States is a woman, but that she's human. Illustrations feature big, expressive faces and give the White House an institutionally friendly vibe as well as a sizable, diverse staff to make it run smoothly. But the story plays a little loose with Penny's age, which is never established. If she's too young to recognize the president on sight, isn't she also too young to be wandering around the White House alone?As a sweet, simple miniexplainer of a very specific bit of jargon, it works, and the election-year timing couldn't be better. (Picture book. 4-8)