The winsome warthog is appealing as he blithely hops, splashes, hums, and wanders his way through his day, but it doesn’t...
An anthropomorphic warthog encounters items, animals, and plants in quantities from one through 10 while exploring the savanna that surrounds his African home.
Jaunty rhyming verses describe each discovery, from “one scoop of honey” through “ten footprints, pair by pair,” but numerals appear only on the endpapers, not within Black’s text. Each verse begins with the phrase, “A warthog went a-wandering,” a pleasing repetition that adds a sense of structure. Most of the things the warthog finds pose no real threat (“two angry bees” are easily eluded) or appear friendly, like the fluttering butterflies, but the footprints do lead him into a potentially perilous encounter. Luckily, if implausibly, he escapes and scampers home safely. Beardshaw’s attractive collage-and-paint illustrations provide a colorful if generic setting and plenty of details to pore over. Varying patterns and textures add interest to the simple stylized shapes. The inclusion of a lurking lion in several scenes foreshadows the final encounter; his cheerful cartoon-style expression should reassure young listeners that all ends well. Differently sized and shaped flaps, some with cutouts, conceal some lines of the text and open to reveal clever transformations. Unfortunately, the storyline meanders, more a vehicle for the counting exercise than an actual plot.
The winsome warthog is appealing as he blithely hops, splashes, hums, and wanders his way through his day, but it doesn’t quite add up to an exciting adventure. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: May 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9323-7
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Nosy Crow
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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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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