A dreamy tale of space flight to set aspiring astronauts’ minds whirling.
In Chicago there lives a girl named Mae whose sights are set on the stars.
Mae Jemison peers through a telescope and wonders about outer space. Her dreams take her floating past passenger jets and through the stratosphere until she’s suspended in space among the universe’s estimated hundreds of billions of galaxies. She perches on a shooting star and rides it as far as a light-year, which she calculates is about six trillion miles. Reflected in the telescope’s lens, Mae sees her future self: a bold astronaut on a daring spacewalk. Backmatter highlights many of Mae’s accomplishments in bite-size blurbs, including her groundbreaking achievement of becoming the first Black female astronaut to travel into space. Smith’s story is fueled by rhyming verse whose rhythm is sometimes unsteady, making for a choppy read-aloud in spite of several very well-paced moments. Monteiro has rendered their eye-catching digital illustrations in a limited palette of the blacks, blues, and gleaming yellows of deep space, balancing futurism and whimsy. Not so much a biography as a snapshot of one curious girl’s astronomical wonder, this book leans more on space facts than on Mae’s life, so readers curious about the trailblazer herself will need to search elsewhere.
A dreamy tale of space flight to set aspiring astronauts’ minds whirling. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781338815290
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: yesterday
Share this feel-good title with those who love art and those who can appreciate the confidence-building triumph of solving a...
Reynolds returns to a favorite topic—creative self-expression—with characteristic skill in a companion title to The Dot (2003) and Ish (2004).
Marisol is “an artist through and through. So when her teacher told her class they were going to paint a mural…, Marisol couldn’t wait to begin.” As each classmate claims a part of the picture to paint, Marisol declares she will “paint the sky.” But she soon discovers there is no blue paint and wonders what she will do without the vital color. Up to this point, the author uses color sparingly—to accent a poster or painting of Marisol’s or to highlight the paint jars on a desk. During her bus ride home, Marisol wonders what to do and stares out the window. The next spread reveals a vibrant departure from the gray tones of the previous pages. Reds, oranges, lemon yellows and golds streak across the sunset sky. Marisol notices the sky continuing to change in a rainbow of colors…except blue. After awakening from a colorful dream to a gray rainy day, Marisol smiles. With a fervent mixing of paints, she creates a beautiful swirling sky that she describes as “sky color.” Fans of Reynolds will enjoy the succinct language enhanced by illustrations in pen, ink, watercolor, gouache and tea.
Share this feel-good title with those who love art and those who can appreciate the confidence-building triumph of solving a problem on one’s own—creatively. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-2345-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sweet fare for bed- or naptimes, with a light frosting of natural history.
A sonorous, soporific invitation to join woodland creatures in bedding down for the night.
As in her Moon Babies, illustrated by Amy Hevron (2019), Jameson displays a rare gift for harmonious language and rhyme. She leads off with a bear: “Come home, Big Paws. / Berry picker / Honey trickster / Shadows deepen in the glen. / Lumber back inside your den.” Continuing in the same pattern, she urges a moose (“Velvet Nose”), a deer (“Tiny Hooves”), and a succession of ever smaller creatures to find their nooks and nests as twilight deepens in Boutavant’s woodsy, autumnal scenes and snow begins to drift down. Through each of those scenes quietly walks an alert White child (accompanied by an unusually self-controlled pooch), peering through branches or over rocks at the animals in the foregrounds and sketching them in a notebook. The observer’s turn comes round at last, as a bearded parent beckons: “This way, Small Boots. / Brave trailblazer / Bright stargazer / Cabin’s toasty. Blanket’s soft. / Snuggle deep in sleeping loft.” The animals go unnamed, leaving it to younger listeners to identify each one from the pictures…if they can do so before the verses’ murmurous tempo closes their eyes.
Sweet fare for bed- or naptimes, with a light frosting of natural history. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4521-7063-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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