More projection than inspiration, with nothing to make up for it and fussy lettering to boot.
Young animals aspire to admirable traits.
Two protagonists—a white bunny and a gray cat—catalog their goals in first-person rhyming verse that could equally be coming from either of them. “Tomorrow I’ll be ADVENTUROUS / I’ll play and I’ll explore // I’ll make or learn or try something / I’ve never done before!” Illustrating that verse’s first half, the bunny stands confidently in a sailboat on a red sea, while the cat—in the boat’s crow’s nest—peers through a spyglass at a treasure chest on a pink island. For the verse’s second half—“make or learn or try” something new—vignettes showcase diving, painting, going to the dentist, and eating sushi with chopsticks. Unfortunately, casting sushi and/or chopsticks as “something…never done before” excludes and exoticizes readers for whom chopsticks and/or sushi are old hat. Hische’s matte illustrations are friendly, with flat, retro-styled shapes. However, each aspirational adjective marches massively across the double-page spreads, overwhelming the other text, and several of them (“strong,” “curious,” “confident,” “brave”) are set in such fancy and enormous display type that new readers (and even some adults) will need to pause and squint before deciphering the word. The first-person voice, ostensibly a child’s, sounds like an adult’s wishful thinking: “Please teach me something new”; “I’ll try my best”; “Tomorrow I’ll be SMART / I’ll think before I act”; “I’ll…think about / how much you’ve helped me grow!”
More projection than inspiration, with nothing to make up for it and fussy lettering to boot. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-8701-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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
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