Bonne nuit, chérie.
Matte black pages with blocks of solid geometric color and a white sans-serif type illustrate a small child’s dialogue with an imaginary monster in the darkness before sleep.
The tickle monster has yellow horns, green hands and feet, and a blocky orange-and-blue body. The child bravely asserts, “You don’t scare me!” Tickling the monster’s body parts one by one makes them fall away. After the feet are tickled, it cannot catch the narrator; after its teeth are tickled, it cannot bite; after its tummy is tickled, it cannot swallow. As it falls into its component parts, it becomes clearer that the tickle monster’s parts are made of toys that sit in the darkness of the room: an orange car; a little house. At last the child declares, “Phew! I can finally go to sleep”—with the awareness that if the monster returns, it can be tickled to pieces once again. The whole is quite elegant in the execution of its dramatic design and the demonstration of how the child copes with fear independently, without calling on a parent. The book is a French import; the original title is Gros Cornichon, in which “cornichon” means not only “pickle” but also something like “twitbrain.”
Bonne nuit, chérie. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4197-1731-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams Appleseed
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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