Nature plus ninjas make a winning combination!
A small green ninja makes nature a little brighter at the backyard level in this action-centered book for nature warriors.
Nature Ninja, a kid ninja shaped vaguely like a human, with a soft round body in the green hue of a cartoon turtle (and no hair) loves nature. Nature Ninja is a kid on a mission: The natural world needs saving! The Amazon Rainforest is being destroyed. There’s a Climate Emergency! The oceans are full of garbage. Nature Ninja wants to solve all of that. “BUT WAIT! I don’t live anywhere near the Amazon Rainforest. I’m actually not even allowed out of my backyard by myself. AND I’m only ONE little ninja,” the child bemoans. Luckily, Nature Ninja’s owl friend, Boobook, has plenty of wisdom, and Nature Ninja launches into several kid-friendly backyard projects that empower kids to change the world one small step at a time. Many books focus too much on the big issues, but Moloney’s three suggestions—planting trees, building a bee hotel, and encouraging parents to let parts of the backyard stay wild—are easy enough to tackle. Sardi’s final illustration, a two-page spread of the whole neighborhood, swarms with details, showing even more possibilities to spark the imagination. While each small project won’t save the world on its own (changes on the national and international level are needed, too), the hope offered here—in the accessible tone, repeated vocabulary, and soft pastel digital illustrations—is a sure-fire inspiration for budding environmentalists.
Nature plus ninjas make a winning combination!Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780645730500
Page Count: 31
Publisher: Nurture in Nature Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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