A sweet and charming tale that validates different ways of expressing love.
A young Vietnamese girl discovers the varied ways in which her friends and family express their love for one another.
Looking for a special place to keep her feelings, Thương asks her friends where they keep their love for their parents. Her friends, a diverse array of children, share the ways they convey affection. These include a vocalized declaration like “I love you” as well as nonverbal actions that demonstrate appreciation and respect. Each of these examples is symbolically linked to a body part. One friend keeps it in his head and explains that trying his best and learning new things make his parents happy. Another friend keeps it in her heart, as doing fun things with her parents makes her happy. Thương also observes members of her family listening carefully, gardening, and cooking her favorite meal. This exploration of expressing familial devotion provides opportunities for social-emotional learning by connecting actions, both physical and emotional, with love. The gentle and affirming tone doesn’t prioritize one form over another and subtly introduces the ways culture can influence our expressions and how we reciprocate affection. The friendly cartoon illustrations are done in a cheery mix of bright pastel colors, which reinforces the soothing comfort of unconditional love. Thương is Vietnamese, and her friends have a range of skin tones and hair colors. A Vietnamese rhyme reflecting the story’s theme is reproduced in the backmatter along with an English translation.
A sweet and charming tale that validates different ways of expressing love. (author's note, Vietnamese glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5132-8943-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: West Margin Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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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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
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