A rose-colored homage to the power of food to build community in a Manhattan melting pot.
This evocative tour of New York City's Lower East Side celebrates the neighborhood’s immigrant cultures.
A tan-skinned Jewish child, old enough for an independent outing, walks through the neighborhood toward the many varied food markets. Along the way, he connects with friends of Puerto Rican, Chinese, and Indian descent, and they gather food from each of their cultures. The wistful text juxtaposes the street-level specifics of urban living—a kosher grocery store, a bodega cat, a roast duck hanging in a window—with philosophical musings about the meaning of home. The digital illustrations mirror this effect, as foregrounded exchanges in the Manhattan markets give way to nostalgic backgrounds depicting the children’s families’ homelands. The postures of the children and their neighbors convey a welcoming warmth, inviting readers—and possibly newcomers—into the markets’ small domains. A quirk of the illustrated eyes, however, makes the lighter-skinned characters look overwhelmingly exhausted, a distracting idiosyncrasy that works against the deliberate positivity of the text. Backmatter provides brief context for each of the Lower East Side cultures depicted in the book, and maps on the endpapers hint at further foods and cultures around the corner. Though the text acknowledges changes over time, it doesn’t mention gentrification, which threatens the robustness of all these neighborhood microcosms.
A rose-colored homage to the power of food to build community in a Manhattan melting pot. (author’s and illustrator’s notes) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781250834171
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Relatable guidance for nocturnal worriers.
Actor and author Greenfield’s latest picture book follows a child kept awake by anxieties.
The pajama-clad narrator huddles in bed among the blue shadows of a bedroom at night. “Every time I close my eyes, I’m afraid of all the scary stuff I see.” Bright, candy-hued clouds of cartoon images surround the child, lively, disruptive depictions of the what-ifs and exaggerated disasters that crowd out sleep: war (we see the world pop “into a piece of popcorn”), kidnapping (pirates carry away the child’s teddy bear), falling “up” into the sun, tarantulas in the toilet, and a menacing-looking dentist. These outsize insomnia inducers may help readers put their own unvoiced concerns into perspective; after all, what frightens one person might seem silly but understandable to another. Our narrator tries to replace the unsettling thoughts with happy ones—hugging a baby panda, being serenaded by a choir of doughnuts, and “all the people who love me holding hands and wearing every piece of clothing that they own.” But sleep is still elusive. Finally, remembering that there’s a difference between reality and an overactive imagination, the child relaxes a bit: “Right now, everything is okay. And so am I.” Reassuring, though not exactly sedate, this tale will spark daytime discussions about how difficult it can be to quiet unsettling thoughts. The child has dark hair and blue-tinged skin, reflecting the darkness of the bedroom.
Relatable guidance for nocturnal worriers. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593697894
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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