A delicately illustrated, enthusiastic, and informative tour of woodland life for young readers.
Various families with children take a rhyming journey through a forest in musician Ginalina’s picture book.
Animals are shown to be worth careful attention in this conservation-minded celebration in which adults and kids encounter a forest packed with birds, leaves, flowers, berries, foxes, and more. Humans’ interactions with the world are peaceful; they scrape in the dirt with sticks, play guitar beneath trees, pick berries, count tree rings, and weave mats from grass. Short stanzas in readable capital letters introduce readers to hemlock, alder, and a “ruby-throated hummingbird” as well as tidbits about nesting habits, food, and life patterns in the woods, but the art also does its share of education. Wills’ lineless, high-contrast illustrations—with flat perspective in coral, dark green, and yellow—mimic the appearance of vintage papercuts and woodcuts while providing relevant identifying features of birds and leaves. The meticulous images lack some of the fluidity, chaos, and mess of the natural world, but pleasant visual echoes underline connectedness: eggs in a nest resemble white bunnies in their burrow, and children poking at the rings of a tree match the shapes of birds drinking water. Featured humans are Asian and appear thin and light-skinned with dark hair, and a range of parent and elder figures hint at diversity in family configurations.
A delicately illustrated, enthusiastic, and informative tour of woodland life for young readers.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-989927-05-2
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Peppermint Toast Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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