A simple but profound meditation on memory and its power to foster continuity and connectedness.
Sitting among blueberry bushes on a hillside overlooking her grandmother’s yellow house, a young girl remembers camping with her mother in the very same spot as a toddler.
From her perch, the girl can see her gramma at the yellow house’s kitchen window. Gramma is washing dishes and silently reminiscing about childhood days spent in her mother’s garden. As the girl’s mother (Gramma’s daughter) comes down the hill to fetch her, she, too, is lost in memories—of fun times spent sorting berries in the yellow house’s kitchen when she was younger. In this fashion, the narrative swings back and forth among the three characters, with the artwork alternating between grayscale spreads showing scenes from their interconnected memories and full-color spreads depicting the present. Readers watch the trio—and the grandmother’s cat—grow older; but, some things, comfortingly, never change. Wherever the characters are (literally or figuratively) in the here and now, the textual refrain points out that they are “also there,” meaning the intangible place where memories lie, untouched by the passage of time. Spare lines of imagistic text on each double-spread page poignantly capture brief moments in time, haikulike, and create a dreamy rhythm well suited to the nostalgic narrative. Goodale’s illustrations, executed on kitaka paper using monoprint, gouache, and (fittingly) blueberry ink, are gentle and quiet with a homespun feel. All characters are White.
A simple but profound meditation on memory and its power to foster continuity and connectedness. (recipe) (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-15394-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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