A memorable story alive with the voice of an Indigenous people seldom heard from.
A young Quechua girl living in a mountain village in Argentina longs to win the coveted flavor bone used to season her family’s soup.
Picu is the youngest of five sisters, seven cousins, and two more children under her mother’s care. In their thatched-roof hut, preparations for the lunch soup have begun, and Mum assigns each child a job. Picu has the least important task—fetching the flavor bone from a neighbor who lives two hours away, perhaps a little more, perhaps a little less, who knows, for there are no clocks to measure time. As she walks to Doña Ciriaca’s house, Picu gets distracted, as children do: She picks fruit, throws dirt at cacti, and turns her bag into a slingshot. Arriving at Doña Ciriaca’s, she receives a bone that has already been used by several other families. Picu’s family will be the last one to use the bone, and then one child will get to keep it as a toy. Picu needs to get back home before noon; otherwise, she might ruin her chances of winning the flavor bone…alas, she’s running late! Moreno’s narrative paints Picu’s world without spectacle—it will be up to readers to grasp the harshness and poverty of her environment. Like Picu’s life, the accompanying illustrations are rough and many-textured; the strong, sometimes jarring colors are both arresting and slightly unsettling. This English translation retains the idiosyncratic voice of the original Spanish (La Hermana menor). (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A memorable story alive with the voice of an Indigenous people seldom heard from. (glossary, translator's note) (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 10, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77164-875-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greystone Kids
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Formulaic but not stale…even if it does mine previous topical material rather than expand it.
A guide to better behavior—at home, on the playground, in class, and in the library.
Serving as a sort of overview for the series’ 12 previous exercises in behavior modeling, this latest outing opens with a set of badly behaving dinos, identified in an endpaper key and also inconspicuously in situ. Per series formula, these are paired to leading questions like “Does she spit out her broccoli onto the floor? / Does he shout ‘I hate meat loaf!’ while slamming the door?” (Choruses of “NO!” from young audiences are welcome.) Midway through, the tone changes (“No, dinosaurs don’t”), and good examples follow to the tune of positive declarative sentences: “They wipe up the tables and vacuum the floors. / They share all the books and they never slam doors,” etc. Teague’s customary, humongous prehistoric crew, all depicted in exact detail and with wildly flashy coloration, fill both their spreads and their human-scale scenes as their human parents—no same-sex couples but some are racially mixed, and in one the man’s the cook—join a similarly diverse set of sibs and other children in either disapprobation or approving smiles. All in all, it’s a well-tested mix of oblique and prescriptive approaches to proper behavior as well as a lighthearted way to play up the use of “please,” “thank you,” and even “I’ll help when you’re hurt.”
Formulaic but not stale…even if it does mine previous topical material rather than expand it. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-36334-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Go, Nathan! Stick it to the Man...er, Fairy.
A lad’s determination to keep his baby teeth sets him against not only the tooth fairy, but the whole Fay bureaucracy behind her.
Far more interested in the teeth than the money, Nathan ingeniously hides each fallen chopper—to no avail, as his assigned tooth fairy is just as determined to collect them, and she comes armed with a high-tech Super Tooth Sensomatic to do the job. Clad in formal office togs and topped with a ’do that wouldn’t dare show even a hair out of place in Parker’s comically detailed digital paintings, the tiny tooth fairy positively oozes bureaucratic severity. But Nathan outlasts her and even a squad of thuggish enforcers euphemistically dubbed “Tooth Experts” from the 15th League of Enchanted Commerce to earn both a rare certificate of exemption and a dental rebate. “ ‘Thanks!’ said Nathan. ‘I’ll keep them forever.’ / And he did.” The increasingly stern official missives from the tooth fairy are depicted in typescript on letterhead in the illustrations. While children are unlikely to have encountered communications of this ilk on their own behalfs, they will likely have seen their grown-ups tearing their hair out over similar ones—and their grown-ups will enjoy them thoroughly.
Go, Nathan! Stick it to the Man...er, Fairy. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4169-7915-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
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