A beautifully illustrated, peaceful song of family, community, and new birth. (Picture book. 3-7)
A celebration of colors through a full cycle of the seasons.
This rhyming, lyrical story opens with a blue-eyed, dark-skinned mother and child enjoying the yellow flowers in a grassy green meadow with the father riding horseback nearby and a lighthouse on the coast in the background. The text accompanying each seasonal sequence includes a refrain that focuses on the colors: “yellow on green” for springtime. The rhythmic text practically sings of the shifting seasons, as spring turns to summer, summer to fall, and so on, while the matte illustrations reveal the child’s curiosity, the family’s bonds, and the mother’s growing roundness as they all prepare for the birth of a baby. A summer trip to the beach brings “turquoise, teal, and blue on green”; “toasty and warm” “cinnamon, almond, and brown on green” abound in fall; winter comes with “gray and taupe and white on green”; and spring sees the addition of a new family member. Since every season includes green, it remains a touchpoint and a refrain throughout. Insects and animals, including the family dog, show up on most pages, giving detail-oriented readers lots to explore. Sala’s intentional inclusion of diversity in this rural community, as folks gather for activities and events, offers mirrors for many kinds of readers and emphasizes the richness of cross-cultural sharing.
A beautifully illustrated, peaceful song of family, community, and new birth. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6278-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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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Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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