Right on track! (Board book. 3-6)
This delightful board book unfolds to become a train almost 6 feet long with lots to explore in each car.
Each page in this concertina-structured book is a train car covered by a big flap, hinged at the top of the page. Lift the flap, and the interior of the car is revealed. Readers can unfold the book to see the train in its full length. Anthropomorphized animals and a multiethnic, multicultural cast of characters constitute the passengers on the train. Colorful cartoonlike illustrations include a gnome, a brawny, kilted white Scot, a scholarly looking bald eagle, a sleeping vampire, and a yoga-practicing giraffe. On the cover readers see a brown-skinned young passenger boarding the train sporting a bright red-and-yellow baseball cap over a black Afro. As the book unfolds, the baseball cap is now missing, and readers will follow the intrepid passenger from car to car on the search for the baseball cap. In each car there are colors to spot, shapes to find, noisy things to identify, and lots of details to take in. On the verso, there is also much to see and identify as the train makes its traverse from countryside to urban setting. Young children and their adult readers will find plenty to keep them engaged.
Right on track! (Board book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2567-8
Page Count: 10
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Adults will do better skipping the book and talking with their children.
Social-equity themes are presented to children in ABC format.
Terms related to intersectional inequality, such as “class,” “gender,” “privilege,” “oppression,” “race,” and “sex,” as well as other topics important to social justice such as “feminism,” “human being,” “immigration,” “justice,” “kindness,” “multicultural,” “transgender,” “understanding,” and “value” are named and explained. There are 26 in all, one for each letter of the alphabet. Colorful two-page spreads with kid-friendly illustrations present each term. First the term is described: “Belief is when you are confident something exists even if you can’t see it. Lots of different beliefs fill the world, and no single belief is right for everyone.” On the facing page it concludes: “B is for BELIEF / Everyone has different beliefs.” It is hard to see who the intended audience for this little board book is. Babies and toddlers are busy learning the names for their body parts, familiar objects around them, and perhaps some basic feelings like happy, hungry, and sad; slightly older preschoolers will probably be bewildered by explanations such as: “A value is an expression of how to live a belief. A value can serve as a guide for how you behave around other human beings. / V is for VALUE / Live your beliefs out loud.”
Adults will do better skipping the book and talking with their children. (Board book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78603-742-8
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Caregivers eager to expose their children to fine art have better choices than this.
From “Apple” to “Zebra,” an alphabet of images drawn from museum paintings.
In an exhibition that recalls similar, if less parochial, ABCs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (My First ABC, 2009) and several other institutions, Hahn presents a Eurocentric selection of paintings or details to illustrate for each letter a common item or animal—all printed with reasonable clarity and captioned with identifying names, titles, and dates. She then proceeds to saddle each with an inane question (“What sounds do you think this cat is making?” “Where can you find ice?”) and a clumsily written couplet that unnecessarily repeats the artist’s name: “Flowers are plants that blossom and bloom. / Frédéric Bazille painted them filling up this room!” She also sometimes contradicts the visuals, claiming that the horses in a Franz Marc painting entitled “Two Horses, 1912” are ponies, apparently to populate the P page. Moreover, her “X” is an actual X-ray of a Jean-Honoré Fragonard, showing that the artist repainted his subject’s face…interesting but not quite in keeping with the familiar subjects chosen for the other letters.
Caregivers eager to expose their children to fine art have better choices than this. (Informational picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5107-4938-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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