A beautiful, touching story of a family’s love and loss, the garden both metaphor and place of healing.
A girl and her nana explore her garden together.
Over the years, a little girl pays many visits to her nana’s house and garden. Where the girl sees lots of weeds, her nana reframes it: “Wildflowers,” she says: “food for the bees.” They pick apples, sing in the rain, look at animal homes, and stargaze by firelight. As the seasons cycle, the girl and her mother continue to visit and, increasingly, to help her nana in the “lovely and wild” garden. Then one winter, Nana is gone, and the snow-filled garden and empty chair reflect the sad, quiet feelings the girl experiences. But even as the girl sits, forlorn, in the chair, a cross section shows two foxes snuggled in a burrow under the snow. And as winter turns to spring, the girl learns life goes on through honoring those we love and carrying on their work. There is so much beauty in this heartwarming story. Written in rhyming couplets, the simple text flows smoothly. The stunning, delicate illustrations fill in the gaps left by the text, depicting the charm of the garden, Nana’s aging, the family’s emotions, and the girl’s growth. The artwork provides a wonderful display of three—and then four—generations and the love they share. The girl and mother have brown skin and long, black hair while Nana has paler brown skin and white hair. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10.8-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 60.4% of actual size.)
A beautiful, touching story of a family’s love and loss, the garden both metaphor and place of healing. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1711-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Templar/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
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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