The animals, counting theme and catchy tune make this song a perennial favorite with readers and creators alike, but the illustrations are what make any version stand out from the crowd—and this one does. By changing a few animals and key words, McDonald encourages readers not just to count her menagerie but to experience their textures, as well, both in the words she uses and in her paper collages. “Over in the meadow in the reeds on the shore, / Lived a spiky mother muskrat / And her little muskrats four.” The mother muskrat is pictured leaping into the water, her individual paper spikes poking out from her body. Similarly treated are her bumpy toad, wooly sheep, smooth robin, fuzzy bee, furry mouse and hairy spider. Using painted papers in digital collage, the illustrator creates a quiltlike textured world for her animals, and many pages come complete with “stitches.” Unfortunately, however, a few of her textures fail to make the leap from the page—the crow is not really shiny, the lizard’s scales are painted on and "slippery" is a very difficult adjective to portray with paper. Backmatter includes a CD of the song (not heard), the sheet music for one verse, some facts about meadows and a short paragraph about each featured animal. Visually stunning if not always totally successful. (Picture book. 2-6)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84686-543-5
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Barefoot Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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