Endearing, engaging, and environmentalist.
A sequel to Billions of Bricks (2016) follows one family’s never-ending tree-planting project.
“We never meant to plant a tree,” says a brown-skinned kid with straight dark hair. Sister Lizzie, apparently White with light brown hair, asked for “a trillium, please,” but the plant store employee misheard her, dooming the siblings and their parents (who look like older versions of Lizzie) to a hopelessly huge arboreal job, planting the first shipment of 1,000 in batches of 100 wherever they can find room. While the narrator first appears oddly disembodied against a white background, the following full-bleed illustrations are detailed and dynamic. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to count 100 trees in a spread, no matter how well the illustrator spaces them out. The text also doesn’t make it totally clear that 10 hundreds add up to make “a thousand” by the end. Rather than a counting exercise, this book might better serve as an introduction to tree types: “Spruce and hemlock. Cedar, too. / A fir for her, a yew for you.” As in Billions, the kids join a multiracial group of neighbors, planting in parks, along roadsides, and even amid the remains of a fire. Turn the book vertically for one spread showing a full-grown sequoia. The rhymes aren’t quite as snappy as the ones in Billions, but they’re still fun. With any luck, the note that “there are more than three trillion trees in the world” will give readers enough of a sense of the 999,999,999,000-tree gap between a thousand and a trillion. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 45% of actual size.)
Endearing, engaging, and environmentalist. (tree facts) (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-22907-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Parent-child love and affection, appealingly presented, with the added attraction of the seasonal content and lack of gender...
A polar-bear parent speaks poetically of love for a child.
A genderless adult and cub travel through the landscapes of an arctic year. Each of the softly rendered double-page paintings has a very different feel and color palette as the pair go through the seasons, walking through wintry ice and snow and green summer meadows, cavorting in the blue ocean, watching whales, and playing beside musk oxen. The rhymes of the four-line stanzas are not forced, as is the case too often in picture books of this type: “When cold, winter winds / blow the leaves far and wide, / You’ll cross the great icebergs / with me by your side.” On a dark, snowy night, the loving parent says: “But for now, cuddle close / while the stars softly shine. // I’ll always be yours, / and you’ll always be mine.” As the last illustration shows the pair curled up for sleep, young listeners will be lulled to sweet dreams by the calm tenor of the pictures and the words. While far from original, this timeless theme is always in demand, and the combination of delightful illustrations and poetry that scans well make this a good choice for early-childhood classrooms, public libraries, and one-on-one home read-alouds.
Parent-child love and affection, appealingly presented, with the added attraction of the seasonal content and lack of gender restrictions. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68010-070-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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