Time flies when you’re having fun reading this terrifically silly spoof.
Private investigator I returns to solve a case of lost time in this new installment of Lazar's Private I series.
“After dozing in my chair, I had some time on my hands,” begins the bright pink anthropomorphic capital letter I, depicted in a simple serif font and sporting a fedora hat and tie. Opting to take a stroll in the not-mean-looking streets of Capital City, he soon discovers that there is something amiss—a thief is absconding with the city’s clocks and timepieces. Private I interviews victims, including the letter G, who humorously goes by the name Grandfather and owns a store called Grandfather’s Clocks.Then the solution dawns on I. He calls for a noontime town meeting in Punctuation Park (“You'll know it's noon when the sun's directly overhead,” I advises), and when a certain letter shows up early, intent on sabotaging the park’s sundial, readers discover that there’s more to the time-averse thief than meets the eye. Wordplay and visual quips abound in this clever and uncontrived sendup of the detective noir drama. Dramatic irony is humorously supplied by the fact that the illustrations hint at the culprit’s identity from the very first pages. Both the puns and the whodunit will help kids build critical thinking and literacy skills. The cartoonish artwork, rendered in watercolor and colored pencil with letterpress details, have a retro sensibility.
Time flies when you’re having fun reading this terrifically silly spoof. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5492-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
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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