An informative, easy-to-follow, pleasing lesson in readying wool for knitting.
A family embraces the Earth and its resources in this Scottish import.
In an appealing bucolic setting, a young girl named Nari feeds her lamb as they are surrounded by chicks, hens, and flowers. Her parents, mother holding a baby, are close by. As the year goes on, the lamb grows bigger, and the affection between girl and animal continues. When spring comes, Nari’s father shears the sheep, and the process of making wool begins. Step by step, Nari and her mother wash the wool, card it, spin it, dye it “yellow as summer sunshine,” and begin knitting. It’s not an easy task for the girl. A big hole appears in her work, but the scarf is completed in time for winter frolics in the snow. Time passes. Nari and her baby sibling have grown; the scarf goes into the compost, which goes into the soil, which enriches the grass, which feeds a lamb. Nari now knits a scarf with her little sister watching attentively under the spreading leaves of a big tree. A penultimate double-page spread details the steps involved in making wool, with helpful numbering and arrows. The text is straightforward, with occasional lyrical repetition. Display text highlights actions and/or onomatopoeia; when Nari digs the compost into the earth, for instance, large italicized letters emphasize the action: “Dig—dig.” Delicate, colorful illustrations fill each page with pretty people, cute animals, and idyllic scenes. Nari and her sister are biracial, with an East Asian mom and White dad.
An informative, easy-to-follow, pleasing lesson in readying wool for knitting. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-78250-658-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Floris
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A welcome addition to autumnal storytelling—and to tales of traditional enemies overcoming their history.
Ferry and the Fans portray a popular seasonal character’s unlikely friendship.
Initially, the protagonist is shown in his solitary world: “Scarecrow stands alone and scares / the fox and deer, / the mice and crows. / It’s all he does. It’s all he knows.” His presence is effective; the animals stay outside the fenced-in fields, but the omniscient narrator laments the character’s lack of friends or places to go. Everything changes when a baby crow falls nearby. Breaking his pole so he can bend, the scarecrow picks it up, placing the creature in the bib of his overalls while singing a lullaby. Both abandon natural tendencies until the crow learns to fly—and thus departs. The aabb rhyme scheme flows reasonably well, propelling the narrative through fall, winter, and spring, when the mature crow returns with a mate to build a nest in the overalls bib that once was his home. The Fan brothers capture the emotional tenor of the seasons and the main character in their panoramic pencil, ballpoint, and digital compositions. Particularly poignant is the close-up of the scarecrow’s burlap face, his stitched mouth and leaf-rimmed head conveying such sadness after his companion goes. Some adults may wonder why the scarecrow seems to have only partial agency, but children will be tuned into the problem, gratified by the resolution.
A welcome addition to autumnal storytelling—and to tales of traditional enemies overcoming their history. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-247576-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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