A welcome reminder to embrace your view of the world.
Ursula is disconcerted to realize she’s living her life upside down—or is she?
Ursula, a sherbet-pink catfish, has a good life. “Weeds waved from above,” “Rays of sun shimmered from below,” and Ursula has “scrumptious buggy buffets” to feast upon. Some might wonder if there’s been a printing mistake: Other characters’ speech bubbles are upside down, and the sun peeks from the bottom of the page. But as readers orient (or disorient?) themselves, they won’t be able to help but share Ursula’s perspective, both artistically and emotionally. After Ursula encounters a fish who questions her unusual position, she’s plagued by existential angst, and the book reorients, with the sky at the top of the page and water at the bottom. Confused, Ursula flops onto a beach, which, as Tabor so drolly puts it, “Is no place for a catfish upside down or otherwise.” Thankfully, Vern the bat flaps over to rescue her. Ursula’s overjoyed to meet another creature who lives life unconventionally aligned. But are they the ones upside down? “Says who?” questions Vern. And, “just like that,” Ursula’s world—and the book—flips again. While her shift to appreciating life outside the norm feels abrupt, readers will be buoyed alongside Ursula. Created with loose, bubbly watercolors and digital collage in jaunty tones of aqua and teal, her watery world is inviting. An author’s note discusses the real-life upside-down catfish, found in the Congo River basin.
A welcome reminder to embrace your view of the world. (Picture book. 4-9)Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780063275560
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
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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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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