For Arbor Day and every day.
Master of Plasticine Reid returns with a celebration of trees and the people who love them.
“There is more than one way to picture a tree.” So begins Reid’s sparsely written, lushly illustrated paean to trees. Written in the second person, the narrator allows readers to imagine trees in many different ways: from branches “drawing” in the sky to a tunnel of trees or an ocean of trees and anything in between. Though the gentle words will encourage readers to slow down and think about what they love about trees, it’s the art that’s the star here. The Plasticine is expressive, detailed and gestural, with emotions showing on each face and careful craft in even the tiniest leaf and twig. The background of each spread has been smoothed and textured, colored and filled with birds, leaves and airplanes. Readers will marvel at the amazing details she includes on each human and animal form—earrings, straw hats, melting ice cream—even eye-rolling teenage boys! The story arc takes readers from late spring to winter and through time. One spectacular double-page spread shows a modern barefooted child in a tree, but the reflection is an old-fashioned reader in socks wearing a rucksack. The varying perspectives shown make this a special book indeed.
For Arbor Day and every day. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8075-6526-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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
BOOK REVIEW
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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