A humorous, engaging tale of a chaotic and entertaining event.
A family invites friends to a Sukkot party in this rhyming picture book.
The Mindel family—parents Janet and Adam, children Shelley and Jimmy, and Ruffles the dog—plans a celebration of Sukkot. To commemorate the Jewish holiday, Jimmy and Shelley set out to gather twigs for the partial roof of a temporary shelter that their parents are building. (A sukkah shelter’s roof shows the sky.) After baking and other efforts by the family, the day of the party finally arrives and the guests appear. But when four frogs also show up, Jimmy has to hatch a plan to keep the party going. Following songs, fun, and cheer, Jimmy loses his first tooth to put a cap on the event. Blumberg’s amusing story takes on a lot with a short, rhyming text: a celebration, a nature crisis, and a mission to keep a tooth safe after it falls out (and get a prize from the tooth fairy). These elements almost feel like too much for one tale, but they are also very true to life, when many incidents can intersect at once. While Lyon’s cartoon images depict a pale-skinned Jewish family with a variety of hair colors, the guests show some diversity in hues. The happy tenor of the party shines through in the well-lit art. Alternative lyrics to familiar public domain songs add to the festive feel, and endnotes provide a rhyming context for readers unfamiliar with the holiday.
A humorous, engaging tale of a chaotic and entertaining event.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-9994463-1-7
Page Count: 56
Publisher: MB Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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