Inconsistent, but an evergreen topic.
Meditations about crying.
“Sometimes, when our hearts hurt, our eyes fill up and we cry,” opens the text, thankfully segueing quickly to a less-cloying register. Much of Delacroix’s piece is straightforward and affirming, explaining who cries—“Everyone cries. Little kids. Big kids. / Once in a while, grownups cry”—and why: “Crying cleans our messy feelings,” and after doing it, “we feel lighter, ready for new adventures.” One page undermines this acceptance: Across from a child portraying the “times we keep [tears] to ourselves” (face buried in arms) is a child portraying the times “we want our tears to be seen” with a dramatic hand gesture, a theater spotlight, and curtains evoking a stage. Readers shy about crying may shrink away if they think their weeping could be seen as a theatrical performance. Cryptic details pop up: “Crocodiles, with their thick, scaly skin, cry too”—but the young audience will likely have no context for crocodile tears, either metaphoric or biological; “sometimes even trees weep”—but is that an unspoken weeping-willow pun, a reference to transpiration, or something deeper? Art combines teardrop patterns with a photorealistic drawing style, mostly black-and-white, featuring shading and big-eyed close-ups of the two White-presenting children who are featured. Cleverly, tears threatening “to wash everything away” form an ocean; a rising hot air balloon drops a ballast bag of tears; and one child’s tears form a park fountain.
Inconsistent, but an evergreen topic. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: March 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77147-422-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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