Apple-themed disquisitions for younger readers tend to be set in the Northeast or Midwest, but Shapiro draws on personal experiences in California to give this one a different slant. Up at sunrise, a family piles into the car for the half-day trip to Grandma and Grandpa’s canyon “apple ranch.” After picking up windfalls for cider, and climbing ladders to pick Granny Smiths, Red and Gold Delicious, Winter Bananas, Macintosh, and “a few stray Gravensteins,” all return to the house for Pippin pie, then, next day open up a busy roadside stand. Shapiro laces her narrative with evocations of that heavenly taste and smell, and caps it with a yummy-looking recipe for microwave-baked apples. Using painted-paper collage to create a wide range of surface textures and artfully blended colors, Harvill sandwiches scenes of smiling figures amid lush, rough-barked trees between endpapers dotted with common apple varieties. A perfect dessert after Gibbons’s Apples (2000) or another of the plethora of informational titles. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8234-1610-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
Give this child’s-eye view of a day at the beach with an attentive father high marks for coziness: “When your ball blows across the sand and into the ocean and starts to drift away, your daddy could say, Didn’t I tell you not to play too close to the waves? But he doesn’t. He wades out into the cold water. And he brings your ball back to the beach and plays roll and catch with you.” Alley depicts a moppet and her relaxed-looking dad (to all appearances a single parent) in informally drawn beach and domestic settings: playing together, snuggling up on the sofa and finally hugging each other goodnight. The third-person voice is a bit distancing, but it makes the togetherness less treacly, and Dad’s mix of love and competence is less insulting, to parents and children both, than Douglas Wood’s What Dads Can’t Do (2000), illus by Doug Cushman. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 23, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-00361-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
``Water is dew. Water is ice and snow.'' No matter what form it takes, seldom has plain old water appeared so colorful as in this rainbow-hued look at rain, dew, snowflakes, clouds, rivers, floods, and seas. Asch celebrates water's many forms with a succinct text and lush paintings done in mostly in softly muted watercolors of aqua, green, rose, blue, and yellow. They look as if they were created with a wet-on-wet technique that makes every hue lightly bleed into its neighbor. Water appears as ribbons of color, one sliding into the other, while objects that are not (in readers' minds) specifically water-like—trees, rocks, roots—are similarly colored. Perhaps the author intends to show water is everything and everything is water, but the concept is not fully realized for this age group. The whole is charming, but more successful as art than science. Though catalogued as nonfiction, this title will be better off in the picture book section. (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-200189-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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