An adorable story about friendship and learning how to state your needs.
When the noise from next door threatens to keep quiet-loving Isobel from completing her math homework on time, she gets serious about resolving her noisy-neighbor situation.
Isobel, who presents as Black, listens to the loud thumps and bumps made by her new and noisy neighbors and imagines that there must be acrobats on the other side of the shared wall. As the noise continues, Isobel thinks that the neighbors must be a marching band or even a basketball team! After a failed attempt to get back at the neighbors by making some noise of her own, Isobel comes up with a new plan. She and her father bake peanut-butter cookies and deliver them with a note asking the new neighbors to be quiet. To her surprise, she receives a note back from her new neighbor, Bernadette—an elephant. Bernadette also has math homework due Monday, and it turns out the two make a winning pair of study partners. Not only is it refreshing to read a story about a little girl who loves math, but it is also exciting to read a book in which a child learns to establish boundaries in a way that is kind and fair. Ford illustrates Isobel’s reality in full color, with skewed angles to emphasize the disruption to her routines; both the equations she’s trying to work and her imagined scenes are represented as monochrome, white-space–filling cartoons.
An adorable story about friendship and learning how to state your needs. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-17810-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Random House Studio
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
A friendship tale with solid messaging and plenty of fun sounds to share.
In this latest in the series, Little Blue Truck, driven by pal Toad, is challenged to a countryside race by Racer Red, a sleek, low-slung vehicle.
Blue agrees, and the race is on. Although the two start off “hood to hood / and wheel to wheel,” they switch positions often as they speed their way over dusty country roads. Blue’s farm friends follow along to share in the excitement and shout out encouragement; adult readers will have fun voicing the various animal sounds. Short rhyming verses on each page and several strategic page turns add drama to the narrative, but soft, mottled effects in the otherwise colorful illustrations keep the competition from becoming too intense. Racer Red crosses the finish line first, but Blue is a gracious loser, happy to have worked hard. That’s a new concept for Racer Red, who’s laser-focused on victory but takes Blue’s words (“win or lose, it’s fun to try!”) to heart—a revelation that may lead to worthwhile storytime discussions. When Blue’s farm animal friends hop into the truck for the ride home, Racer Red tags along and learns a second lesson, one about speed. “Fast is fun, / and slow is too, / as long as you’re / with friends.”
A friendship tale with solid messaging and plenty of fun sounds to share. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780063387843
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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