A straightforward story of tractors, colors, and common understanding.
Bartel delivers an illustrated children’s book that introduces colors and farm equipment in a unique way.
Jesse is a young boy who, like many kids, loves things with wheels—especially tractors. This story, which features full-color cartoon illustrations by Thompson, teaches colors by using examples of real-life tractor brands that are green, blue, or red and naming other objects that share each color. Jesse’s mom’s green tractor matches the hue of cucumbers and summer leaves; the blue tractor that his uncle drives shares the color of blueberries; and the red tractor that Jesse’s neighbor drives recalls tomatoes and a stop sign. As a result, Jesse refers to objects that aren’t tractors with familiar tractor brand names; this causes confusion when he attends school and mistakenly describes grass as “John Deere,” for example, and a river as “Ford.” After an entire day of this, Jesse hatches a plan and asks his loved ones to drive their tractors to school for his classmates to see. Once the rest of Jesse’s classmates and his teacher make the connection, they understand why he was naming colors in such odd ways the day before. Their bafflement vanishes, and young readers will come away from the tale understanding that sometimes a person will make unusual associations that may require clarification. The author uses the term sour beer in several places when referring to ginger ale, and many readers may be unfamiliar with this terminology; however, this aspect fits the book’s message, intentionally or not. The illustrations portray Jesse and his family as light-skinned, while Jesse’s classmates and other characters are depicted with a diverse range of skin tones.
A straightforward story of tractors, colors, and common understanding.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2022
ISBN: 9781039149182
Page Count: 32
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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