A warm, heartfelt paean to a leafy refuge for beautiful birds and happy children.
In Pearl’s picture book, a beloved tree and a centuries-old castle share a storied pastoral history.
A majestic tree stands in a field miles away from the bustling city of London, England. Local children climb its branches, sit high among its leaves, and rest beneath its shaded canopy. As darkness approaches, colorful peahens and peacocks perch upon its limbs for shelter while the children and their families fall sleep in their homes. It is during this quiet time that the tree shares memories of times past with the castle (Woodcroft Castle, a real-life edifice that dates back to the 13th century) upon whose grounds it was planted. They recount how the castle came to be and reminisce about simpler times. (“Together, they remember when there were no trains or cars or planes. When there was only sun and night and wrong and right.”) As day breaks, the children rush to feed the peacocks and peahens and return to their favorite tree. Pearl’s soft pastel illustrations, which have a grainy texture, suit the story’s pastoral setting, and pages incorporating black-and-white shadow play effectively represent the historic battles waged at Woodcroft Castle. The text is written in brief poetic stanzas. Alluding to Woodcroft’s fractious history, the author sets the stage for the message she hopes to impart to her readers: Care should be taken with humans, animals, trees…and all living things.
A warm, heartfelt paean to a leafy refuge for beautiful birds and happy children.Pub Date: June 27, 2024
ISBN: 9781838757663
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Nightingale Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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