A gorgeously rendered affirmation fueled by powerful metaphors to bolster self-love.
Encouraging words help young readers value their own inner lights in this beautifully painted, self-esteem-bolstering picture book.
Electric lights turn on and off, but two lights remain constant: the sun and each person’s own inner light. “It beams out through your grin and is uniquely yours,” the narrator explains, celebrating qualities such as intelligence, determination, and curiosity that make that light shine. Just as the sun sometimes goes behind a cloud, inner lights also change; they can foster community, encourage bravery, offer fortitude in the face of a struggle, or support determination in spite of failure. Sometimes, the light is seen in a reflection in others. Despite struggles and trials, it always flickers back to life. Cino’s scientific description of the sun sets a tone for the concept of inner value to be treated as fact, bolstering the messages of self-acceptance and appreciation with an aura of authority. But the text also has a comforting cadence, couched in poetic descriptions with vocabulary-stretching words (such as emits and persistent) well placed for easy understanding. Saumell’s beautiful paintings feature well-lit backgrounds with clear, textured brush strokes. The images seem to follow one main child with fair skin and brown hair, growing from young to older into the adult years and grandparenthood. The bright colors are captivating, and lap readers will pore over the book’s pages.
A gorgeously rendered affirmation fueled by powerful metaphors to bolster self-love.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2024
ISBN: 9798988925101
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whimspire Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite.
Humpty Dumpty, classically portrayed as an egg, recounts what happened after he fell off the wall in Santat’s latest.
An avid ornithophile, Humpty had loved being atop a high wall to be close to the birds, but after his fall and reassembly by the king’s men, high places—even his lofted bed—become intolerable. As he puts it, “There were some parts that couldn’t be healed with bandages and glue.” Although fear bars Humpty from many of his passions, it is the birds he misses the most, and he painstakingly builds (after several papercut-punctuated attempts) a beautiful paper plane to fly among them. But when the plane lands on the very wall Humpty has so doggedly been avoiding, he faces the choice of continuing to follow his fear or to break free of it, which he does, going from cracked egg to powerful flight in a sequence of stunning spreads. Santat applies his considerable talent for intertwining visual and textual, whimsy and gravity to his consideration of trauma and the oft-overlooked importance of self-determined recovery. While this newest addition to Santat’s successes will inevitably (and deservedly) be lauded, younger readers may not notice the de-emphasis of an equally important part of recovery: that it is not compulsory—it is OK not to be OK.
A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-682-6
Page Count: 45
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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