Beautiful, haunting descriptions of words and the power they hold will make this a favorite for linguaphiles, both old and...
A young girl shares her love of words and their power in this fanciful tribute to language.
Luna, who lives in the sky, collects words. “Words so beautiful that they make you cry, friendly words that embrace your soul.... / Magic words, delicious words... magnificent words.” But one day the words stop coming. Luna learns that the people have become too busy to remember the importance of words. With her collection, she travels across the land. Where Luna finds darkness and despair she plants words of compassion and love. When her words run out, people begin to create—and generously share—new words. Playful type and placement of text personify the words, as they luminously glow in a jar, fly in a cage or float from a page, seamlessly integrated with the images. Wimmer’s illustrations, done with a European sensibility, are even and rendered with the same texture throughout, perhaps to allow the words to shine. Unfortunately, while the text appears free-spirited, the painting is labored and overworked. It is a testament to her impeccable design that the spreads are visually interesting, despite the drawings, and manage to create a compelling story. An addendum that reproduces the text in conventional layout is included to give readers clarity, as the spreads are so whimsically designed.
Beautiful, haunting descriptions of words and the power they hold will make this a favorite for linguaphiles, both old and new. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-84-15241-34-8
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Cuento de Luz
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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