Offering graceful rhymes, this imaginative celebration of fathers and daughters dances across the page.
Four girls wait for their fathers to pick them up from ballet class in this picture book.
Four young ballet dancers with different skin tones, hair colors, and features are all dressed in their leotards and tutus in a performance studio overlooking a rainy city scene. Each is “awaiting a prince from their part of the world,” and the story shifts to the fathers as they travel from their jobs—as a fisherman, train conductor, taxi driver, and briefcase-carrying businessman. Three of the papas have journeys that dovetail: The fisherman takes the train with the conductor, and both get into the taxi driver’s cab. But the last father, after losing his umbrella to the wind, is sidetracked rescuing a dog stranded in a sinkhole. When the three papas arrive at the studio, they dance a waltz with their daughters, and the last girl feels left out and worried. The rest bring her into a group dance, but she sadly makes to leave the studio—until her father arrives at the last moment. (“And the stars lit a waltz by the sea.”) In this lively and inventive tale, Brown’s rhythmic, dance-centered rhymes focus on the rain and the waltz metaphor, allowing much of the poignant storytelling to happen in the pictures. Tabakh’s beautiful digital illustrations, completed in Procreate, appear hand-drawn, using a painterly style with vivid textures that encourage young readers to pore over the pages.
Offering graceful rhymes, this imaginative celebration of fathers and daughters dances across the page.Pub Date: April 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73774-474-0
Page Count: 36
Publisher: 4 Blank Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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