Playful and inviting armchair travel for conscientious youngsters.
With shaped pages and a fold-out map, this is a guide to the landmarks of the Big Apple.
Many NYC tourist sights are illustrated, including the expected (the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Times Square) and the too-rarely depicted (Chinatown and Harlem’s Apollo Theater), often in paired double-page spreads, with the die-cut page on the recto becoming a different vantage point (or inside) of the tourist attraction on the verso. Cleverly, the rectangular windows of the facade of the main building of the New York Public Library become the spines of shelved books when the page is turned and readers enter. Cosneau’s flat, graphic images in muted, cool colors adeptly capture the busy energy of the city, presenting a diverse cast of people with stylized skin tones of warm gray, chalk white, mustard yellow, and salmon pink. Franceschelli peppers the art with a few brief lines that set the scene: “GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL / People rushing. People running. // Where’s my train? Time to GO!” The first spread is a fold-out map that provides a key to the 10 featured landmarks, though it is not scaled for navigation. It is incorrectly labeled as a map of New York City (Staten Island and the Bronx are nowhere in sight, and Brooklyn and Queens are gray spaces on the margins). The companion title, Hello Paris!, takes young readers across the pond with a similar format and illuminates landmarks in the City of Lights, such as the Louvre, Montmartre, and Notre-Dame. With thinner-than-normal board pages sporting die-cuts, fold-out maps, and spines that could easily give way, both titles are best suited to readers already accustomed to books.
Playful and inviting armchair travel for conscientious youngsters. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2829-7
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Abrams Appleseed
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
A cheery board book to reinforce the oneness of babykind.
Ten babies in 10 countries greet friends in almost 10 languages.
Countries of origin are subtly identified. For example, on the first spread, NYC is emblazoned on a blond, white baby’s hat as well as a brown baby’s scoot-car taxi. On the next spread, “Mexico City” is written on a light brown toddler’s bike. A flag in each illustration provides another hint. However, the languages are not named, so on first reading, the fine but important differences between Spanish and Portuguese are easily missed. This is also a problem on pages showing transliterated Arabic from Cairo and Afrikaans from Cape Town. Similarly, Chinese and Japanese are transliterated, without use of traditional hànzì or kanji characters. British English is treated as a separate language, though it is, after all, still English. French (spoken by 67 million people) is included, but German, Russian, and Hindi (spoken by 101 million, 145 million, and 370 million respectively) are not. English translations are included in a slightly smaller font. This world survey comes full circle, ending in San Francisco with a beige baby sleeping in an equally beige parent’s arms. The message of diversity is reinforced by images of three babies—one light brown, one medium brown, one white—in windows on the final spread.
A cheery board book to reinforce the oneness of babykind. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938093-87-6
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Duo Press
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Satisfying, engaging, and sure to entertain the toddlers at whom it is aimed.
Nine basic shapes in vivid shifting colors are stacked on pages in various permutations.
This visually striking and carefully assembled collection of shapes, which seems to have been inspired by an Eric Carle aesthetic, invites young children to put their observation, categorization, problem-solving, color, and spatial-relation skills to work, pondering shapes and compositions—and even learning about prepositions in the process. As the text says, “a stack of shapes can make you think and wonder what you see.” First, readers see a circle under a strawberry (the red diamond with a leafy, green top and yellow-triangle seeds) and then that berry over a green square. The orange oval made to look like a fish is added to a stack of three shapes to become “yellow over diamond under guppy over green.” And so on. The metamorphosis of many of these simple shapes into animals (a yellow circle becomes a lion; a green square, a frog; a pink heart, a pig; a yellow diamond, a chicken) will surprise and delight children. Questions are directed at readers: Is a square with two round eyes and semicircle feet a “frog or square or green?” Why, all of the above! The text possesses a pleasing rhythm and subtle rhymes, positively begging to be read aloud: “circle next to berry / square by bear by sweet // blue up high / pig down low / yellow in between.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Satisfying, engaging, and sure to entertain the toddlers at whom it is aimed. (Picture book. 2-4)Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-79720-508-3
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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