This French import is well intentioned but unlikely to melt many hearts.
Even though a beloved snowman melts away, his friends learn he isn’t gone forever.
Four forest animals depend on the Snowman’s wisdom and antics. When spring’s arrival melts him away, the group sets off to the seaside to search for what’s left of the Snowman, ultimately finding him watching them from above as a puffy, snowman-shaped cloud. Learning that they can reunite with the Snowman when the snow falls is a clever and sweet wrap-up, but as a whole, the book feels stuck in the slush. The wordy, meandering plot makes the book feel aimless—is it meant to be a reflection on friendship and loss or a rollicking journey story? Since the initial relationship between the critters and their frosty friend feels underdeveloped, their grief seems contrived, and given his moderately uncanny black button eyes, some readers might be a little relieved to see the Snowman thaw. Rabbit, Hedgehog, Squirrel, and Owl share the same flaw, all portrayed in a semirealistic style but with disconcertingly blank eyes that aren’t entirely offset by their darling winter hats. Charming or moving pages are scattered through—a boisterous wagon ride; a beautifully blurred page in olive, tan, and brown of small faces staring up in wonder—but they don’t quite overcome the illustrations in which the animal’s bodies are peculiarly shaped and scaled.
This French import is well intentioned but unlikely to melt many hearts. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5526-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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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