A sweet, brief glimpse into a universal childhood experience in a very specific place
Better safe than sorry when you don’t feel well.
In a small village in eastern Nigeria, Vicky, who looks about 6, watches listlessly as her friends play all around her and doesn’t take part. Nor does she join in when they start drawing pictures. Vicky also won’t eat her mother’s food, a sure sign that something’s wrong. Her father feels her forehead; it’s hot. Her mother declares she must take Vicky to the doctor. The clinic’s not far away, so they’re able to walk. The doctor, a grandmotherly woman with wire-rimmed eyeglasses, has a gentle manner. She takes Vicky’s temperature and listens to her chest, recommending that the little girl be kept cool and given lots of water. In no time, Vicky feels much better, displaying a healthy appetite and playing and drawing pictures with her friends again. The high-resolution color photographs that illustrate the book provide many interesting details of village life in Nigeria, and Vicky makes a winsome protagonist. In contrast, the story is a bit flat, and Onyefulu’s text has the brevity and stiltedness of a primer. This accessibility should appeal to beginning readers, but as a read-aloud it suffers. Ife’s First Haircut, a companion piece featuring an adorable male toddler, shares this offering’s strengths and weaknesses.
A sweet, brief glimpse into a universal childhood experience in a very specific place .(Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84780-363-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Echoes of Runaway Bunny color this exchange between a bath-averse piglet and his patient mother. Using a strategy that would probably be a nonstarter in real life, the mother deflects her stubborn offspring’s string of bath-free occupational conceits with appeals to reason: “Pirates NEVER EVER take baths!” “Pirates don’t get seasick either. But you do.” “Yeesh. I’m an astronaut, okay?” “Well, it is hard to bathe in zero gravity. It’s hard to poop and pee in zero gravity too!” And so on, until Mom’s enticing promise of treasure in the deep sea persuades her little Treasure Hunter to take a dive. Chunky figures surrounded by lots of bright white space in Segal’s minimally detailed watercolors keep the visuals as simple as the plotline. The language isn’t quite as basic, though, and as it rendered entirely in dialogue—Mother Pig’s lines are italicized—adult readers will have to work hard at their vocal characterizations for it to make any sense. Moreover, younger audiences (any audiences, come to that) may wonder what the piggy’s watery closing “EUREKA!!!” is all about too. Not particularly persuasive, but this might coax a few young porkers to get their trotters into the tub. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25425-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet but misleading.
A plucky child becomes a space traveler.
Arceneaux was the first pediatric cancer survivor and the first with a prosthetic body part to become an astronaut, part of the first all-civilian space mission in 2021. The author, who in 2022 published the adult memoir Wild Ride and its 2023 adaptation for middle-grade readers, here shares her story with an even younger audience. Told in the third person, the narrative emphasizes the bravery she summoned as she coped with a cancer that left her with a prosthetic leg bone and knee (hinted at with an incision line in one illustration) and went on to become a space traveler. Curiously, Hayley and her astronaut colleagues are portrayed as children. They play with a “stuffed toy alien,” and in an imagined episode, Hayley ventures outside the spacecraft to perform a repair. Accompanied by softly hued illustrations with character designs that recall Precious Moments figurines, the narrative emphasizes familiar details of space travel that will appeal to children; both their bodies and their food float in zero gravity. The mission splashes down safely, and Hayley rushes to hug her mom. Though Arceneaux was the youngest astronaut to have orbited the Earth, she was an adult when she did so. The odd choice to depict her as a child reduces her compelling story to a fantasy. Arceneaux is white; other characters are diverse.
Sweet but misleading. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593443903
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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