An excellent choice for themes of friendship and trust.
Henry stops speaking to his best friend, Bea, but Bea is still there for him when he needs a friend.
Henry and Bea understand each other, and that’s why they are best friends. They always have fun together and are pictured reading inside a tent, playing hide-and-seek, sharing a cookie, and watching the clouds. Then one day, Henry seems “quiet and sad.” He wants to be alone, and even an announcement about a field trip to a farm doesn’t make him excited. At the farm, though, Bea gently offers her company to Henry. Finally, when they are alone, Henry reveals that his beloved cat died. Bea sits with him as he cries and helps him say goodbye to his friend. When they rejoin the group in order to take shelter from a storm, Bea implicitly understands that she shouldn’t tell anyone about what he shared. On the final picture, a rainbow peeks through the storm clouds as the friends share cookies once more. Bagley’s artwork creates an emotionally resonant experience, with the use of white space, perspective, and the expanse of the double-page spread to communicate emotional closeness, distance, and isolation. Readers will be invested in this simple, elegantly told tale and will not be disappointed at its conclusion. Henry is white, Bea is brown, and their classmates are fairly diverse.
An excellent choice for themes of friendship and trust. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4284-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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
As insubstantial as hot air.
A diverse cast of children first makes a fleet of hot air balloons and then takes to the sky in them.
Lifestyle maven Gaines uses this activity as a platform to celebrate diversity in learning and working styles. Some people like to work together; others prefer a solo process. Some take pains to plan extensively; others know exactly what they want and jump right in. Some apply science; others demonstrate artistic prowess. But “see how beautiful it can be when / our differences share the same sky?” Double-page spreads leading up to this moment of liftoff are laid out such that rhyming abcb quatrains typically contain one or two opposing concepts: “Some of us are teachers / and share what we know. / But all of us are learners. / Together is how we grow!” In the accompanying illustration, a bespectacled, Asian-presenting child at a blackboard lectures the other children on “balloon safety.” Gaines’ text has the ring of sincerity, but the sentiment is hardly an original one, and her verse frequently sacrifices scansion for rhyme. Sometimes it abandons both: “We may not look / or work or think the same, / but we all have an / important part to play.” Swaney’s delicate, pastel-hued illustrations do little to expand on the text, but they are pretty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.2-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70.7% of actual size.)
As insubstantial as hot air. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4003-1423-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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