Sure to find love on the baby-shower circuit.
A love song of sorts from parent to child, illustrated with animal families and a surfeit of snuggles.
First-person, rhyming verse expresses parental love for children, with double-page spreads devoted to animal families that exemplify each loving statement. In keeping with the singular first-person text and title, there is always one parent on a given spread, but the number of offspring depicted varies. An early spread depicts a family of cheetahs or leopards lounging in a tree with text reading “I love your sleepy wake-up smile, as we start our day. / I love our morning cuddles, and the way we laugh and play.” The closing picture is of a house cat curled up in an armchair with five kittens at day’s end alongside text that reads “So snuggle down and close your eyes, the night is soft and still. / I love you, love you, love you, and I always, always will!” Between these feline lovefests, polar bears, dogs, bees, snakes, and many other animals, all anthropomorphized to greater or lesser extent, appear in affectionate tableaux to accompany the text. The sweet-as-sugar illustrations are painted in an Easter-egg palette with rounded forms and occasional heart embellishments to reinforce the text’s theme.
Sure to find love on the baby-shower circuit. (Picture book. 1-3)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-9904-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
A joyful celebration.
Families in a variety of configurations play, dance, and celebrate together.
The rhymed verse, based on a song from the Noodle Loaf children’s podcast, declares that “Families belong / Together like a puzzle / Different-sized people / One big snuggle.” The accompanying image shows an interracial couple of caregivers (one with brown skin and one pale) cuddling with a pajama-clad toddler with light brown skin and surrounded by two cats and a dog. Subsequent pages show a wide array of families with members of many different racial presentations engaging in bike and bus rides, indoor dance parties, and more. In some, readers see only one caregiver: a father or a grandparent, perhaps. One same-sex couple with two children in tow are expecting another child. Smart’s illustrations are playful and expressive, curating the most joyful moments of family life. The verse, punctuated by the word together, frequently set in oversized font, is gently inclusive at its best but may trip up readers with its irregular rhythms. The song that inspired the book can be found on the Noodle Loaf website.
A joyful celebration. (Board book. 1-3)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-22276-8
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Rise x Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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