A comforting, encouraging, and practical bedtime story for the troubled sleeper.
A mother helps her little boy to plan his dreams before sleeping in Ojo’s picture book.
Alexander, an elementary-school-aged boy, is in bed at bedtime. His mama turns off the light and his red, starry nightlight comes on, but he’s not sleepy and doesn’t want his parent to leave: “Please, one more book? One more kiss? / One more hug?” Mama curls up beside him for one last cuddle; she senses that he feels scared, so she asks, “What should we do / in your dreams tonight?” This sparks Alexander’s imagination, and he thinks of various dreams he could dream, involving cuddling his baby brother, slam-dunking a basketball with his older sibling, lying on a dinosaur’s back and looking at the stars, or driving trucks with his mama. Tan’s dreamy illustrations offer stylized characters and watercolor settings with soft spots of color that illuminate Alexander’s bedroom and the purple night sky. The imagined daytime scenes are bright and fun, and they complement the theme of embracing new adventures. Ojo’s rhyming verse has a melodious quality that embodies the story’s calm tone. The book’s ending prepares readers for slumber: “So what will you do / in your dreams this sleep?” Alexander is portrayed with brown skin; his mother has a pale skin tone.
A comforting, encouraging, and practical bedtime story for the troubled sleeper.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9798218432447
Page Count: 24
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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