A serviceable but not particularly stellar ode to female empowerment.
Kroll encourages girls and women along every step of their life journey.
A Black infant with Afro puffs shimmies, crawls, and wobbles. When she grows into a toddler, she meets two other girls: one White and redheaded with twin ponytails and the other brown-skinned, straight-haired, and cued as Asian. The book follows these girls and their friendship as they grow and change, with the text addressing them directly throughout: baby, toddler, little girl, big kid, teen, young lady, woman. The messaging is overtly motivational: “lean toward tomorrow,” “reach high, / for all your dreams,” “always do you,” “know your worth,” and “make yourself proud.” Glenn’s digital artwork is full of bold colors, background patterns, and smiling faces and refreshingly shows girls discovering their passions as they age (in this case, activism, soccer, and photography.) No boys or men are pictured, and the girls all resemble their mothers, missing an opportunity to show family diversity. There is, however, fat representation, and a background character wears a hijab. The story rhymes, but the text layout sometimes makes it hard to determine the directionality of print, so some readers may miss the rhyming pattern; also, the meter is often clunky and lacks polish, making the book tough to read aloud fluidly. An audience is hard to pin down—the simple presentation is ideal for emergent readers, but the time skips may fly over their heads. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A serviceable but not particularly stellar ode to female empowerment. (Board book. 2-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9859-4
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Little Simon/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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