A sweet and well-meaning lesson in personification and metaphor, but this picture book fails to shine.
The sun sends the world and its inhabitants warm thoughts for peace, unity, and positivity.
A smiling sun shines down on each double-page spread, just as the moon did in Storms and Pavlović’s previous book, Moon Wishes (2019). Using the refrain “if I were the sun,” the narrator describes the sun’s movement from sunrise to sunset throughout the seasons of the year. The sun is personified as a serene explorer, muse, and comforter who lovingly wakes the world with “a gentle morning song” and ends each day with peaceful rest. In between rising and setting, the sun explores “every corner of this wondrous earth.” Alas, the narrative is disappointingly disjointed—the sun flits among pages that depict African wildlife, a school of smiling fish swimming up toward the sun, and a bear fishing in a river. Looking at the world from the sun’s point of view, the narrator is better able to “delight in all our differences”—the accompanying illustration shows 11 disparate birds perched in the same tree. Meanwhile, human diversity is portrayed on other pages: Happy children—some with brown skin, others with pink skin—make snow angels; a man using a wheelchair sits at a harvest table; and an Asian-presenting man wearing a conical hat walks across marshland. Pavlović’s loose mixed-media, colored-pencil, and ink illustrations use warm colors and are as consistently uplifting as Storms’ pretty but desultory word pictures. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A sweet and well-meaning lesson in personification and metaphor, but this picture book fails to shine. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77306-450-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Sweet but misleading.
A plucky child becomes a space traveler.
Arceneaux was the first pediatric cancer survivor and the first with a prosthetic body part to become an astronaut, part of the first all-civilian space mission in 2021. The author, who in 2022 published the adult memoir Wild Ride and its 2023 adaptation for middle-grade readers, here shares her story with an even younger audience. Told in the third person, the narrative emphasizes the bravery she summoned as she coped with a cancer that left her with a prosthetic leg bone and knee (hinted at with an incision line in one illustration) and went on to become a space traveler. Curiously, Hayley and her astronaut colleagues are portrayed as children. They play with a “stuffed toy alien,” and in an imagined episode, Hayley ventures outside the spacecraft to perform a repair. Accompanied by softly hued illustrations with character designs that recall Precious Moments figurines, the narrative emphasizes familiar details of space travel that will appeal to children; both their bodies and their food float in zero gravity. The mission splashes down safely, and Hayley rushes to hug her mom. Though Arceneaux was the youngest astronaut to have orbited the Earth, she was an adult when she did so. The odd choice to depict her as a child reduces her compelling story to a fantasy. Arceneaux is white; other characters are diverse.
Sweet but misleading. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9780593443903
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Convergent
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Echoes of Runaway Bunny color this exchange between a bath-averse piglet and his patient mother. Using a strategy that would probably be a nonstarter in real life, the mother deflects her stubborn offspring’s string of bath-free occupational conceits with appeals to reason: “Pirates NEVER EVER take baths!” “Pirates don’t get seasick either. But you do.” “Yeesh. I’m an astronaut, okay?” “Well, it is hard to bathe in zero gravity. It’s hard to poop and pee in zero gravity too!” And so on, until Mom’s enticing promise of treasure in the deep sea persuades her little Treasure Hunter to take a dive. Chunky figures surrounded by lots of bright white space in Segal’s minimally detailed watercolors keep the visuals as simple as the plotline. The language isn’t quite as basic, though, and as it rendered entirely in dialogue—Mother Pig’s lines are italicized—adult readers will have to work hard at their vocal characterizations for it to make any sense. Moreover, younger audiences (any audiences, come to that) may wonder what the piggy’s watery closing “EUREKA!!!” is all about too. Not particularly persuasive, but this might coax a few young porkers to get their trotters into the tub. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25425-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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