A unique fantasy take on easing anxiety about medical procedures.
Siblings go to a magical world to cure their stuffy, snotty noses in Neighbors’ debut picture book.
Benji is concerned that his younger sister Briana (the children have fair skin and brown hair) isn’t feeling well as she sneezes stringy green snot everywhere. He decides to take matters into his own hands, saying that they need to take some pretend medicine—and so their adventure begins. Immediately upon arriving in a fantasy land with purple foliage, a sparkly sky, and a castle in the distance, Benji is greeted by the famed Booger Doctor, who is eager to help sneezy Briana. He leads her, with accompanying fairies, into an examination room to look up Briana’s nose for the source of all the snot. Benji offers to go first to make Briana feel more comfortable. The Booger Doctor says that Benji needs surgery, but promises it will be easy, and Briana encourages him to be brave. Benji wakes up to ice cream, and the pair travel back home to their bedroom. The story, written by a medical doctor, is imaginative and charming (“Benji, do you still have a booger problem?”). The text is on the longer side for a picture book, and the plot may be confusing and hard to follow for the youngest listeners. Still, they’ll be won over by Crecelius’ vivid illustrations, which are sweet, colorful, and engaging.
A unique fantasy take on easing anxiety about medical procedures.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9798890341686
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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