A lively look at community, connections, and ways to foster change.
Saturdays are a flurry of chores at Meena’s house.
She and her sisters help her mother shop and tidy up to prep the house for a deluge of visitors. Meanwhile, her brother lounges in bed reading. Meena knows this is unfair, but her mother says that’s just the way things have always been since she was a little girl growing up. Meena’s family, the first to emigrate from their village in India, help others who come later. As afternoon rolls around, aunts, uncles, and cousins fill the house with activity. While Meena makes countless cups of chai, the women prepare elaborate meals. The children entertain themselves by watching Bollywood movies and reenacting dance and action scenes. At dinner, tradition dictates that the women eat after the men. Meena knows that this, too, is unfair, and today, she decides to bring about change by sitting down to dinner with her father and the other men. The story mirrors the realities of many immigrant communities, demonstrating how families often gather to prepare and enjoy food and give new arrivals a leg up in a new land. Told in a realistically childlike voice, the narrative also highlights the gender disparity that many children encounter from a very young age. The bright watercolor illustrations are bursting with life. Traditional Indian clothes and food figure prominently as characters chatter and play in a whirlwind of chaos and togetherness.
A lively look at community, connections, and ways to foster change. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593110317
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Kokila
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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
Sadly, the storytelling runs aground.
A little red sleigh has big Christmas dreams.
Although the detailed, full-color art doesn’t anthropomorphize the protagonist (which readers will likely identify as a sled and not a sleigh), a close third-person text affords the object thoughts and feelings while assigning feminine pronouns. “She longed to become Santa’s big red sleigh,” reads an early line establishing the sleigh’s motivation to leave her Christmas-shop home for the North Pole. Other toys discourage her, but she perseveres despite creeping self-doubt. A train and truck help the sleigh along, and when she wishes she were big, fast, and powerful like them, they offer encouragement and counsel patience. When a storm descends after the sleigh strikes out on her own, an unnamed girl playing in the snow brings her to a group of children who all take turns riding the sleigh down a hill. When the girl brings her home, the sleigh is crestfallen she didn’t reach the North Pole. A convoluted happily-ever-after ending shows a note from Santa that thanks the sleigh for giving children joy and invites her to the North Pole next year. “At last she understood what she was meant to do. She would build her life up spreading joy, one child at a time.” Will she leave the girl’s house to be gifted to other children? Will she stay and somehow also reach ever more children? Readers will be left wondering. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 31.8% of actual size.)
Sadly, the storytelling runs aground. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72822-355-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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