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POEM IN MY POCKET

This book about wordplay strikes the write balance between silly and sincere.

An unnamed protagonist arrives home with a poem in their pocket.

Unfortunately, the protagonist doesn’t realize that that pocket has a hole in it. Words, verses, and stanzas tumble out of the poet’s pocket, and a sudden wind scatters them down the stairs and into the neighborhood. Before long, the mischievous letters of the poem wreak good-natured havoc, fabricating new nonsensical words, creating new rhymes, and filling the world with puns. The poet runs after the letters, trying to catch them. Eventually, the poet gathers the letters together and tries to re-create the original poem only to find that it is a puzzle they are unable to solve. When the wind dies down, the rain starts, and the words are scattered again. Will the poet be able to re-create their poem? Or would words and letters rather be free to play? This rhyming picture book is a celebration of the flexibility of language. The illustrations incorporate age-appropriate puns, nonsense words, and other forms of wordplay that are sure to delight young readers and the adults who read to them. Although the text does not explicitly embrace diverse themes, in the illustrations, the protagonist is an ambiguously gendered kid of color. The brightly colored landscape looks urban, but it could be set almost anywhere in the world.

This book about wordplay strikes the write balance between silly and sincere. (Picture book. 4-8)

Pub Date: June 1, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-5253-0145-2

Page Count: 24

Publisher: Kids Can

Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021

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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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LOVE FROM THE CRAYONS

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

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