A short but sweet picture book offering children with dyslexia a new way to approach unexpected challenges.
Robby the taxi must cope with an unexpected change to his routine in Lynn and Jonathan Greenberg’s picture book.
Robby is a small yellow taxi in the big, big city of Greensborough. He’s dyslexic; the narrator explains, “He has trouble reading the signs he drives under, but he is the most creative little cab you’ll ever meet!” His solution is to memorize the routes he travels, and his employer, Creative Cab Company, is happy to accommodate him by allowing him to drive the same route every day. However, one day, when Robby picks up his client, Mr. Walter, the businessman throws him for a loop when he announces a last-minute change in plans that requires him to go to the airport. While the lesson about staying calm to come up with unconventional ideas is strong, the build-up to Robby’s triumph over his problem is minimal—more fleshing out of the narrative would have increased the tension and its ultimate relief. Jonathan Greenberg’s watercolor illustrations are colorful and childlike, echoing Robby’s own personality. Robby’s expressions are clear to the reader, like when he learns about the route change and lines around his eyes indicate his surprise. The book is typeset in a dyslexic-friendly font.
A short but sweet picture book offering children with dyslexia a new way to approach unexpected challenges.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2023
ISBN: 9798987227909
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Empower Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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