Competent illustrations, muddied storyline.
A little girl who loves to draw is shy about showing her pictures to anyone.
Young Lily is “afraid of what others might think of her drawings, so she [keeps] her pictures hidden in her sketchbook.” While author/illustrator Seal’s illustrations are varied in their presentation—double-page spreads are interspersed with spot illustrations, vignettes, and full-page bleeds—the overall presentation doesn’t sparkle as a book about art should. The characters’ expressions are uniformly pleasant, and the illustrations mostly mirror the text. A few notable illustrations reach beyond, however, as when Lily’s imagination is visually underscored by her drawing of a rainy day and a poignant moment when she draws herself in a group of children. The storyline inevitably engineers that Lily’s drawings are accidently seen by the townspeople—a gust of wind scatters them—and Lily is mortified until she realizes that people are praising them. Strangely, here the storyline moves from confidence in drawing to confidence in telling stories as, “for the first time in Lily’s life, words came spilling out of her.” The final illustration and its accompanying text add to this perplexity by showing Lily surrounded by new friends admiring her pictures, with the words: “And now she’d found a voice, and friends to share them with.” This conflation of storylines, strange grammar aside, is just plain confusing. Lily presents white while other residents of her picturesque town are somewhat diverse.
Competent illustrations, muddied storyline. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: March 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4413-2937-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Peter Pauper Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses...
This tan-skinned, freckle-faced narrator extols her own virtues while describing the challenges of being of mixed race.
Protagonist Lilly appears on the cover, and her voluminous curly, twirly hair fills the image. Throughout the rhyming narrative, accompanied by cartoonish digital illustrations, Lilly brags on her dark skin (that isn’t very), “frizzy, wild” hair, eyebrows, intellect, and more. Her five friends present black, Asian, white (one blonde, one redheaded), and brown (this last uses a wheelchair). This array smacks of tokenism, since the protagonist focuses only on self-promotion, leaving no room for the friends’ character development. Lilly describes how hurtful racial microaggressions can be by recalling questions others ask her like “What are you?” She remains resilient and says that even though her skin and hair make her different, “the way that I look / Is not all I’m about.” But she spends so much time talking about her appearance that this may be hard for readers to believe. The rhyming verse that conveys her self-celebration is often clumsy and forced, resulting in a poorly written, plotless story for which the internal illustrations fall far short of the quality of the cover image.
Mixed-race children certainly deserve mirror books, but they also deserve excellent text and illustrations. This one misses the mark on both counts. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63233-170-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Eifrig
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Fun, fun, fun all through the town!
This book’s gonna werk, werk, werk all through Pride Month and beyond.
Drag persona Lil Miss Hot Mess rewrites “The Wheels on the Bus” to create a fun, movement-filled, family-friendly celebration of drag. The text opens with the titular verse to establish the familiar song’s formulaic pattern: “The hips on the drag queen go SWISH, SWISH, SWISH… / ALL THROUGH THE TOWN!” Along the way, more and more drag queens join in the celebration. The unnamed queens proudly display a range of skin tones, sizes, and body modifications to create a diverse cast of realistic characters that could easily be spotted at a Pride event or on RuPaul’s Drag Race. The palette of both costumes and backgrounds is appropriately psychedelic, and there are plenty of jewels going “BLING, BLING, BLING.” Don’t tell the queens, but the flow is the book’s real star, because it encourages natural kinetic participation that will have groups of young readers giggling and miming along with the story. Libraries and bookshops hosting drag-queen storytimes will find this a popular choice, and those celebrating LGBTQ+ heritage will also find this a useful book for the pre-K crowd. Curious children unfamiliar with a drag queen may require a brief explanation, but the spectacle stands up just fine on its own platforms.
Fun, fun, fun all through the town! (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7624-6765-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Running Press Kids
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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