by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2020
Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones.
Moving away from the island where she’s always lived, a little girl misses everything, especially her best friend.
Izzy loves living on an island in a lighthouse with a “staircase that twirled high into the sky.” Most of all, she loves her sea gull pal, Frank. On “gray-storm-rainy days,” they dig for buried treasure, play hide-and-seek, and draw in the sand. On “blue-sky-sunny days,” they swim with seals and hunt crabs or starfish. “Wild-wind-blowy days” they evade sea monsters and fight pirates. Then Izzy moves to the city, to a small house with “sharp corners” and no sea view. Izzy hates the city. The games other children play seem alien, and she must wear shoes and be quiet. She misses the wind, salt, sand, the lighthouse, the island, and, most of all, Frank. Izzy searches the streets and sky for Frank, and, one morning, he alights on her windowsill, ready to help her reinvent her life. Peppered with sensory images—“wind that whistled and wailed,” “crusty crabs,” and “sparkly, spiky starfish”—the alliterative text invites reading aloud. With its perky palette of aqua and orange, the simple, playful illustrations show Izzy as an exuberant white girl with freckles and unruly red curls who gradually adapts her free-spirited island life with Frank to an urban venue with new, diverse friends.
Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: July 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950354-23-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scribble
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
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by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer
by Sybil Rosen ; illustrated by Camille Garoche ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2021
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
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by Eric Carle ; illustrated by Eric Carle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 15, 2015
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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edited by Eric Carle
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by Eric Carle ; illustrated by Eric Carle
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