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COUNTING ELEPHANTS

Name: COUNTING ELEPHANTS
Author: Dawn Young
ISBN: 978-0-7624-6694-8

by Dawn Young ; illustrated by Fermin Solis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020

Another average addition to an exponentially growing field.

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An energetic magician frustrates a staid counter’s endeavor to quantify a herd of elephants.

Written entirely in scripted dialogue, this odd effort takes middling passes at both humor and counting. The Counter’s metafictional announcement—that this is a counting book—is immediately contradicted by the Magician, who insists they are collaborating on magic, not math. Clad in the traditional black-and-red top hat and cape, the Magician begins transforming the gathered group of 10 elephants before the Counter even commences. Each time an attempt to enumerate begins, the Magician alters another elephant: The first becomes a frog; the second, a jar of peanut butter; the third, one of jelly; the fourth through seventh, some puppies; the eighth and ninth, more frogs; and the 10th, a rabbit. After restoring the elephants, the Magician turns the exasperated Counter into an anthropomorphic bag of (literal) “nuts.” In a genre distinguished by clever variations on a theme, these conceits—counting down rather than up and adding across categories to arrive at a total—just don’t tally, as the target age proves ambiguous. Solis’ digitally created images, which recall 1950s-era animation, teeter on the boundary between warm familiarity and generic boredom, with animated facial expressions lending them some exuberance. The text placement doesn’t always correspond with illustrations, hindering the counting exercise. Human characters are both white.

Another average addition to an exponentially growing field. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: March 3, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-7624-6694-8

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Running Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS

- BOOK REVIEW
ONCE UPON A CHRISTMAS
by Dawn Young ; illustrated by Kenneth Anderson

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CARPENTER'S HELPER

by Sybil Rosen ; illustrated by Camille Garoche ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2021

Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.

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A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.

Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: March 16, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

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LOVE FROM THE CRAYONS

by Drew Daywalt ; illustrated by Oliver Jeffers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2019

As ephemeral as a valentine.

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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)