The daughter of illustrator Jane Dyer debuts with similarly elegant, understated, richly colored illustrations for 21 lullabies from the likes of Eve Merriam, Margaret Wise Brown, Sylvia Plath, and Eugene Field. In keeping with tradition, the rhythms are often more restful than the semantic content: Malachy Doyle writes of a “Dancing Tiger,” Andrew Matthews envisions a “Dream Horse, fiery red / Showering sparks as I shake my head,” and Jack Prelutsky’s contribution opens, “Last night I dreamed of chickens, / There were chickens everywhere, / They were standing on my stomach, / they were nesting in my hair.” Dyer declines to take up the challenge of Brian Patten’s “Mooning,” preferring to populate her twilit landscapes with woolly sheep, autumnal trees, and drowsy children, all beneath a huge, benevolent moon. Though not the most irresistibly somniferous bedtime reading, the selections are nonetheless a pleasing mix of chestnuts and fresh takes. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-17474-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Echoing Ashley Wolff’s 1988 approach to Stevenson’s poetic tribute to the power of imagination, Kirk begins with neatly drawn scenes of a child in a playroom, assembling large wooden blocks into, “A kirk and a mill and a palace beside, / And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.” All of these acquire grand architectural details and toy-like inhabitants as the pages turn, until at last the narrator declares, “Now I have done with it, down let it go!” In a final twist, the young city-builder is shown running outside, into a well-kept residential neighborhood in which all the houses except his have been transformed into piles of blocks. Not much to choose between the two interpretations, but it’s a poem that every child should have an opportunity to know. (Picture book/poetry. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-689-86964-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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