Translated from the Portuguese and first published in England, this account of a child’s discovery of the world and its...
This cheerfully existential tome charms, from the stylized cherry tree on the endpapers to the very last page.
The first page is black, with white sans-serif letters: “When I was born I had never seen anything.” The narrator had never seen “the sun or a flower or a face” or the sea or the forest. His hands didn’t know about playing. "Everything was about to start." His mouth discovers it can taste and shout and kiss and stick his tongue out. He lists smells he loves, like the scent of his grandmother’s lap. Each day he discovers something new: running and jumping; saying “nice words and bad words”; learning colors. The images are made of strong, simple shapes and hues of red, white, black, green and gold. There is a wonderful spread of peppers, cherries, melons and tomatoes, as well as a wall of family pictures with an uncle with a long (bright) red beard, an auntie with green skin, a pink-faced grandpapa and a golden-skinned grandmamma (both with white hair). Birds, animals, leaves and boxes sit proudly on the pages, surrounding the child, who sports a green-and-white striped shirt and rosy cheeks.
Translated from the Portuguese and first published in England, this account of a child’s discovery of the world and its wonders unfolds self-consciously but winningly . (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-85437-958-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tate/Abrams
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
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
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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