A great lesson for young readers about maintaining healthy friendships.
Three best friends must learn to broaden their horizons in Dunklee’s picture book.
Annie, Lilianne, and Lillemor are three best friends who like to do everything together, but their teacher Mrs. Adams doesn’t always let them. When a field trip requires each student to only have one bus partner, Mrs. Adams insists that they pair off. “It was very difficult for Lillemor to choose between her two best friends, so she tried to make it easier.” She tries a guess-the-number game and flipping a coin but does not come to a conclusive answer. Mrs. Adams has no time to waste, so she assigns Annie to sit apart with another classmate, Meilin. Despite all of Annie’s attempts to sneak back to her friends, she ends up staying with her new partner, who has been separated from her own friends. Annie discovers that both she and Meilin have a love of languages—and that meeting someone new doesn’t mean abandoning your old friends. This narrative is ideal for tight-knit friendship groups that need a gentle dose of reality. Dunklee conveys all the dialogue through speech bubbles, giving the format a proto-graphic-novel vibe that seamlessly integrates her text with Smith’s illustrations. The latter portrays Lillemor with white skin and blonde hair, Annie with light brown skin and brown hair, and Lilianne with dark brown skin and dark brown hair.
A great lesson for young readers about maintaining healthy friendships.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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