This book about wordplay strikes the write balance between silly and sincere.
An unnamed protagonist arrives home with a poem in their pocket.
Unfortunately, the protagonist doesn’t realize that that pocket has a hole in it. Words, verses, and stanzas tumble out of the poet’s pocket, and a sudden wind scatters them down the stairs and into the neighborhood. Before long, the mischievous letters of the poem wreak good-natured havoc, fabricating new nonsensical words, creating new rhymes, and filling the world with puns. The poet runs after the letters, trying to catch them. Eventually, the poet gathers the letters together and tries to re-create the original poem only to find that it is a puzzle they are unable to solve. When the wind dies down, the rain starts, and the words are scattered again. Will the poet be able to re-create their poem? Or would words and letters rather be free to play? This rhyming picture book is a celebration of the flexibility of language. The illustrations incorporate age-appropriate puns, nonsense words, and other forms of wordplay that are sure to delight young readers and the adults who read to them. Although the text does not explicitly embrace diverse themes, in the illustrations, the protagonist is an ambiguously gendered kid of color. The brightly colored landscape looks urban, but it could be set almost anywhere in the world.
This book about wordplay strikes the write balance between silly and sincere. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5253-0145-2
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees.
After Duncan finds his crayons gone—yet again—letters arrive, detailing their adventures in friendship.
Eleven crayons send missives from their chosen spots throughout Duncan’s home (and one from his classroom). Red enjoys the thrill of extinguishing “pretend fires” with Duncan’s toy firetruck. White, so often dismissed as invisible, finds a new calling subbing in for the missing queen on the black-and-white chessboard. “Now everyone ALWAYS SEES ME!…(Well, half the time!)” Pink’s living the dream as a pastry chef helming the Breezy Bake Oven, “baking everything from little cupcakes…to…OTHER little cupcakes!” Teal, who’s hitched a ride to school in Duncan’s backpack, meets the crayons in the boy’s desk and writes, “Guess what? I HAVE A TWIN! How come you never told me?” Duncan wants to see his crayons and “meet their new friends.” A culminating dinner party assembles the crayons and their many guests: a table tennis ball, dog biscuits, a well-loved teddy bear, and more. The premise—personified crayons, away and back again—is well-trammeled territory by now, after over a dozen books and spinoffs, and Jeffers once more delivers his signature cartooning and hand-lettering. Though the pages lack the laugh-out-loud sight gags and side-splittingly funny asides of previous outings, readers—especially fans of the crayons’ previous outings—will enjoy checking in on their pals.
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593622360
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
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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