A nice entree to the school year.
Differences and similarities among schools around the world.
Readers will glean intriguing facts about how students get to school and learn, study, play, and even eat lunch in schools in America and various global locations in this briskly paced early reader in three chapters. First up is the chapter describing how pupils travel. Some go by buses or subways, as in New York City; other transport options include snowmobile (Mackinac Island, Michigan), cable car (Caracas, Venezuela), or zipline (Colombia). Some kids walk miles (Nigeria), while motorcycle rickshaws transport pupils in some areas of Thailand. Readers will learn that in some towns in India, students receive instruction on train platforms or in buses and that some students learn on riverboats in flood-prone regions of Bangladesh. Young readers will be especially interested in the “Schoolwork and Play” chapter, which provides information about the length of school days, what school lunches are like, and how much homework is assigned. Readers won’t envy some South Korean high schoolers, who attend class for more than 14 hours daily, but they might wish they lived in Finland, where school days last five hours and students receive 75 minutes of daily recess and less than three hours of homework each week, or in France, where pupils get two-hour daily lunch breaks, with meals consisting of mouthwatering, multicourse cuisine. These interesting tidbits and more are delivered via short sentences written in a breezy, conversational tone and will help young readers understand that they’re connected to kids everywhere. Colorful, lively illustrations feature children and adults with a broad range of skin tones. A glossary opens the book, which includes a world map.
A nice entree to the school year. (create your own school!) (Early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781665957212
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon Spotlight
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era.
The New Orleans school child who famously broke the color line in 1960 while surrounded by federal marshals describes the early days of her experience from a 6-year-old’s perspective.
Bridges told her tale to younger children in 2009’s Ruby Bridges Goes to School, but here the sensibility is more personal, and the sometimes-shocking historical photos have been replaced by uplifting painted scenes. “I didn’t find out what being ‘the first’ really meant until the day I arrived at this new school,” she writes. Unfrightened by the crowd of “screaming white people” that greets her at the school’s door (she thinks it’s like Mardi Gras) but surprised to find herself the only child in her classroom, and even the entire building, she gradually realizes the significance of her act as (in Smith’s illustration) she compares a small personal photo to the all-White class photos posted on a bulletin board and sees the difference. As she reflects on her new understanding, symbolic scenes first depict other dark-skinned children marching into classes in her wake to friendly greetings from lighter-skinned classmates (“School is just school,” she sensibly concludes, “and kids are just kids”) and finally an image of the bright-eyed icon posed next to a soaring bridge of reconciliation. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A unique angle on a watershed moment in the civil rights era. (author and illustrator notes, glossary) (Autobiographical picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-75388-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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