This could lead to some storytime or classroom counting fun.
At the end of a day spent outside, 10 siblings each take a turn counting themselves and come up one short.
What will they tell their mother? Readers may think she’ll be relieved, as the kids are outside because she tossed them out after they’d “blundered” too many things in the house. And in Jack’s cartoon illustrations, all views of her save one portray her as either angry or exasperated. After a full afternoon playing by and in the creek (no adult supervision, but it’s only waist-deep), their mom’s words echo: Keep track of each other and be home by sundown. But no matter if they count by ones, twos, or threes, in English or Spanish, every child who attempts the count comes up with only nine kids (readers are in on the joke, as in every illustration the counter is missing a number). Upon returning home, they tell their mother an outlandish story but quickly come clean at the sight of the table set for 10. She finds the missing child, though not the missing pies, which the kids have carefully portioned…twice! Jack’s characters have an array of hair colors and heights, though most tend toward light skin and very thin physiques; one wears glasses. Even though their names are typically associated with gender, the presentation of several kids is ambiguous. Oddly, their noses and ears are distractingly darker than their faces.
This could lead to some storytime or classroom counting fun. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0109-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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