Mess-makers will revel in Grimelda’s tale.
Children with messy rooms are sure to empathize with Grimelda, and they will see the twist at the end coming a mile away, to their parents’ chagrin.
“She used her broom to fly, not sweep. / Her floors had dirt six inches deep. / But though she said she didn’t mind, / sometimes things were hard to find.” And that’s just the situation Grimelda finds herself in when she wants to try out a new recipe for pickle pie: she can’t find the pickle root. And a finding spell is out of the question since her spell book is not on its shelf. The little witch finds all sorts of lost treasures in her hunt for the missing ingredient, but it isn’t until she has actually swept and tidied and hung up that she finds the pickle root. But before she can cook, something just has to be done about her unnaturally tidy house. But will the pickle root stay where she puts it? Readers with good eyes will spy the ingredient in a couple illustrations—it has help disappearing. The digital illustrations seem to revel in the mess, and there are lots of funny things for readers to spy and shake their heads over—how did that get there? Grimelda is a white redhead with huge, puffy pigtails.
Mess-makers will revel in Grimelda’s tale. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-226448-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre.
Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.
The family picnic is today. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s; her Groundling father appears to be a white human. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. Desperate to avoid this, Lina and her friend Claudia, who is black, get Lina accepted at the Hilltop Science and Arts Academy. Lina’s parents allow her to go as long as she does lessons with grandpa on Saturdays. However, fitting in at a Groundling school is rough, especially when your powers start freak winter storms! With the story unfurling in diary format, bright-pink–highlighted grayscale illustrations help move the plot along. There are slight gaps in the storytelling and the pacing is occasionally uneven, but Lina is full of spunk and promotes self-acceptance.
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-35393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Sweet but misleading.
A plucky child becomes a space traveler.
Arceneaux was the first pediatric cancer survivor and the first with a prosthetic body part to become an astronaut, part of the first all-civilian space mission in 2021. The author, who in 2022 published the adult memoir Wild Ride and its 2023 adaptation for middle-grade readers, here shares her story with an even younger audience. Told in the third person, the narrative emphasizes the bravery she summoned as she coped with a cancer that left her with a prosthetic leg bone and knee (hinted at with an incision line in one illustration) and went on to become a space traveler. Curiously, Hayley and her astronaut colleagues are portrayed as children. They play with a “stuffed toy alien,” and in an imagined episode, Hayley ventures outside the spacecraft to perform a repair. Accompanied by softly hued illustrations with character designs that recall Precious Moments figurines, the narrative emphasizes familiar details of space travel that will appeal to children; both their bodies and their food float in zero gravity. The mission splashes down safely, and Hayley rushes to hug her mom. Though Arceneaux was the youngest astronaut to have orbited the Earth, she was an adult when she did so. The odd choice to depict her as a child reduces her compelling story to a fantasy. Arceneaux is white; other characters are diverse.
Sweet but misleading. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593443903
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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