Simple lines, simple colors, simple story but a useful tale about complex emotions that often seem too big to contain.
Sometimes, no means no. Period.
A child out with an adult asks for ice cream. Amid expansive white space, the book’s minimal colors appear only in the title type, the scoops of ice cream, the child’s shirt, and the solid-colored backgrounds as the child progresses from happy, expectant, and hopeful to all the other emotions that progress toward a meltdown when a guardian won’t budge. Gender-neutral and drawn only with thick black outlines, the child wears a top that changes colors to match the backgrounds and the shifting moods: yellow for happy, green for envy (because everybody else has ice cream!), blue for tears of sadness, gray for obstinate, red for angry. As readers vicariously experience this child’s eventual acceptance of no, they may intuit that they, too, can manage difficult emotions, even when compromise seems increasingly unlikely. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and Molly Bang’s When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry… take a more nuanced and creative approach to helping children manage conflicts and emotions, but this story does center the child. As in “Peanuts” comics, the adult, appearing only from the waist down, looks the same on every page while the dynamic child contrasts with the static adult. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Simple lines, simple colors, simple story but a useful tale about complex emotions that often seem too big to contain. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-38265-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Rise x Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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