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NIGHT TRAIN

A little boy and his father take the night train to visit Grandma in this rhyming story told with few words and huge, double-page-spread illustrations. Stutson (Cowpokes, 1999, etc.) provides the short, poetic text in rhyming couplets with evocative language describing sights and sounds. Her writing conveys the little boy’s excitement at his first train ride and at traveling in an unusual way at an unusual time with his daddy all to himself. Tillotson (Nice Try, Tooth Fairy, 2000, etc.) works with shades of blue, lavender, and gold to convey the gigantic size and power of the train, effectively capturing the other-worldly sense of speeding through the night while the golden lights of other places fly by. She varies her perspectives so that the reader looks at the train (and the boy inside the train) from different angles, adding to the sense of motion and the overall feeling of a long journey. The vaguely old-fashioned setting suggests the ’30s or ’40s, with tall skyscrapers and a huge train station with a vaulted ceiling. The oversized format and consistent use of double spreads make this an ideal addition to story hours with train or travel themes. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: April 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-7613-1598-5

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002

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ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.

The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)

Pub Date: June 21, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016

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THE DAY THE CRAYONS QUIT

A comical, fresh look at crayons and color

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Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.

Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.

A comical, fresh look at crayons and color . (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: June 27, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Philomel

Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013

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