A beautifully illustrated tale that encourages readers to look for the sparkle in everyone.
The sparkle from a shooting star searches for her purpose in this debut rhyming picture book.
As a star shoots by Earth, a sparkle falls, plummeting into a muddy alley. Each time she tries to get somewhere safe, she finds herself worse off. First, she’s stuck in the rain, then she gets caught in a cat’s fur. The feline takes her to the forest, but it’s no better there. She lands “in the river, / to her deep despair.” After the river mishap, she gets lost in the fog, falls into a hole in a tree, and ends up tumbling into a dumpster. As she’s about to lose hope, she decides she needs a goal or she’ll keep stumbling into misadventures. Inspired by a nearby house’s glow, she enters and finds her purpose: lighting the heart of a little brown-skinned boy. Witek’s phrases scan well, with a mostly consistent rhythmic pattern and solid rhymes throughout. The plot is a little clunky, with travel from the city to the forest, back to the city, and to a rural farmhouse in an order that doesn’t feel natural. The sparkle’s goal—brightening someone’s life—works as a metaphor in ways that the connection to shooting stars doesn’t. But Mikki’s gorgeous skyscape images are eye-catching and worth poring over, which may make readers wish the sparkle spent less time in the trash and fog and more time in the glorious, starry night.
A beautifully illustrated tale that encourages readers to look for the sparkle in everyone.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039163539
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on...
Continuing from their acclaimed Those Shoes (2007), Boelts and Jones entwine conversations on money, motives, and morality.
This second collaboration between author and illustrator is set within an urban multicultural streetscape, where brown-skinned protagonist Ruben wishes for a bike like his friend Sergio’s. He wishes, but Ruben knows too well the pressure his family feels to prioritize the essentials. While Sergio buys a pack of football cards from Sonny’s Grocery, Ruben must buy the bread his mom wants. A familiar lady drops what Ruben believes to be a $1 bill, but picking it up, to his shock, he discovers $100! Is this Ruben’s chance to get himself the bike of his dreams? In a fateful twist, Ruben loses track of the C-note and is sent into a panic. After finally finding it nestled deep in a backpack pocket, he comes to a sense of moral clarity: “I remember how it was for me when that money that was hers—then mine—was gone.” When he returns the bill to her, the lady offers Ruben her blessing, leaving him with double-dipped emotions, “happy and mixed up, full and empty.” Readers will be pleased that there’s no reward for Ruben’s choice of integrity beyond the priceless love and warmth of a family’s care and pride.
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on children. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6649-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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