Unabashedly artsy and sure to enjoy a long stay on the read-again shelf.
In this seek-and-find story aimed at children beginning their reading journey, readers follow a young boy and his dog as they search for naughty, elusive puppies.
An artistic boy who is the namesake of Britain’s famous Tate art gallery leaves home and walks to a museum with his rainbow-hued poodle, Pup, in tow. As they enter the museum, Pup notices five poodle pups, each a different color, trailing them. Once inside, the little whelps promptly blend into the elaborate exhibits. While Pup relentlessly searches for them with binoculars, Tate draws dinosaurs, planets, and butterflies in his sketchbook. Each time he draws, the text challenges readers to find the hidden pups in his crowded artwork. On the way home, Pup is gloomy, uncertain as to the puppies’ fates. Children and adults alike will smile at the happy ending. This leveled reader uses predictable and repetitive text with sight words, but there is just enough variety in the sentences to support the amusing narrative. The illustrations, created with black gesso, ink, graphite, colored pencil, and watercolor, are the real centerpiece. Kirsch is just as adept at rendering the colorful museum exhibits as the grayscale, childlike drawings in Tate’s sketchbook. Young readers will find the fun Where’s Waldo?–element of this story hard to resist. Tate and the only other human character, a museum docent, are both White.
Unabashedly artsy and sure to enjoy a long stay on the read-again shelf. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4605-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A welcome addition to autumnal storytelling—and to tales of traditional enemies overcoming their history.
Ferry and the Fans portray a popular seasonal character’s unlikely friendship.
Initially, the protagonist is shown in his solitary world: “Scarecrow stands alone and scares / the fox and deer, / the mice and crows. / It’s all he does. It’s all he knows.” His presence is effective; the animals stay outside the fenced-in fields, but the omniscient narrator laments the character’s lack of friends or places to go. Everything changes when a baby crow falls nearby. Breaking his pole so he can bend, the scarecrow picks it up, placing the creature in the bib of his overalls while singing a lullaby. Both abandon natural tendencies until the crow learns to fly—and thus departs. The aabb rhyme scheme flows reasonably well, propelling the narrative through fall, winter, and spring, when the mature crow returns with a mate to build a nest in the overalls bib that once was his home. The Fan brothers capture the emotional tenor of the seasons and the main character in their panoramic pencil, ballpoint, and digital compositions. Particularly poignant is the close-up of the scarecrow’s burlap face, his stitched mouth and leaf-rimmed head conveying such sadness after his companion goes. Some adults may wonder why the scarecrow seems to have only partial agency, but children will be tuned into the problem, gratified by the resolution.
A welcome addition to autumnal storytelling—and to tales of traditional enemies overcoming their history. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-247576-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Low grade.
A gray character tries to write an all-gray book.
The six primary and secondary colors are building a rainbow, each contributing the hue of their own body, and Gray feels forlorn and left out because rainbows contain no gray. So Gray—who, like the other characters, has a solid, triangular body, a doodle-style face, and stick limbs—sets off alone to create “the GRAYest book ever.” His book inside a book shows a peaceful gray cliff house near a gray sea with gentle whitecaps; his three gray characters—hippo, wolf, kitten—wait for their arc to begin. But then the primaries arrive and call the gray scene “dismal, bleak, and gloomy.” The secondaries show up too, and soon everyone’s overrunning Gray’s creation. When Gray refuses to let White and Black participate, astute readers will note the flaw: White and black (the colors) had already been included in the early all-gray spreads. Ironically, Gray’s book within a book displays calm, passable art while the metabook’s unsubtle illustrations and sloppy design make for cramped and crowded pages that are too busy to hold visual focus. The speech-bubble dialogue’s snappy enough (Blue calls people “dude,” and there are puns). A convoluted moral muddles the core artistic question—whether a whole book can be gray—and instead highlights a trite message about working together.
Low grade. (glossary) (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-4340-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Two Lions
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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