One of the prettiest paeans to the codex in recent memory.
This book quietly praises reading as a path to imaginative adventures while also taking several gentle swipes at high-tech gadgetry.
“And when your time comes to a close and the other world begins to call, don’t worry.” No, this close-to-the-final-page sentence does not refer to death but to leaving one’s book life for what some call “real life.” The beginning of the book makes it clear that a book is “quiet” and “ordinary”—“No buttons. No bonus levels”—until “you learn to look closer….” Thoughtful, poetic phrases are well-matched by mixed-media artwork that includes scraps of typed words in French and English, some of which are authors’ names. A black-haired Caucasian child in a red-and-white–striped shirt moves through a nonthreatening, fantastical world where “imagination scrapes the skies of opportunity, / the forests of what-could-be stretch beyond the horizon, // and the friends of fact and fiction make believe all night long under the milky stars of possibility.” Pastel skies lead to firefly-bedecked nights, adding a bedtime story’s allure. If this book is published as an e-book or app, some of its appeal will give way to irony. Its humor lies in such digs as, “It will never be sick, because viruses can’t catch it. // It will never go dark, because it doesn’t need batteries.”
One of the prettiest paeans to the codex in recent memory. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-939629-65-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Familius
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color.
Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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