Zany fun well worth repeat reads.
Visit Happy County again for a year of fun.
Readers are invited back to the action-packed adventures found in Happy County in this fourth installment of the series. These titles are designed for readers who love spending hours poring over a book’s pages to spot all the wacky hijinks, and Long doesn’t disappoint with these hand-drawn, digitally tinted illustrations. The characters are a brightly colored menagerie of animal citizens waiting to usher readers into their lives. An octopus wearing a backpack and a red fez uses a crosswalk to get to school; a beaver struggles to keep up with the snow using ever larger tools; a hummingbird gardener explains pollination. Savvy caregivers will use the book’s colorful style and open-ended questions to engage their kiddos by turning this title into a multiuse tool to encourage conversation, deductive reasoning, and vocabulary building. The book bounces from topic to topic and activity to activity with a carefree brio that high-energy readers will enjoy. The range of spread design is diverse, including picture dictionary, seek-and-find, and comics panels. While some activities fall flat, there’s so much happening most readers will be amused and challenged. The seasonal approach is organizational rather than scientific, and the buoyant, Muppet-like energy will carry readers through all four of them. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Zany fun well worth repeat reads. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-76599-4
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Haphazard but jolly enough for one outing; it probably won’t last for more.
A flurry of mail addressed to Duncan’s crayons ushers in the Christmas season in this novelty spinoff of the bestselling The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) and The Day the Crayons Came Home (2015).
Actual cards and letters are tucked into envelopelike pouches pasted to the pages; these are joined in some cases by other ephemera for a package that is likely to invite sudden, intense play followed by loss and/or damage that will render the book a disappointment to reread. That’s probably OK, as in contrast to the clever story that kicked this small series off, this outing has a hastily composed feel that lacks cohesion. The first letter is addressed to Peach from Mom and includes a paper doll of the “naked” (de-wrappered) crayon along with a selection of tabbed changes of clothing that includes a top hat and tails and a bikini top and bottom. Peach’s implied gender fluidity does not mitigate the unfortunate association of peach with skin color established in the first book. The sense of narrative improvisation is cemented with an early page turn that takes the crayons from outdoors snow play to “Feeling…suddenly very Christmas-y, the crayons headed inside.” Readers can unpack a box of punch-out decorations; a recipe for gluten-free Christmas cookies that begins “go to store and buy gluten-free cookies”; a punch-out dreidel (turns out Grey is Jewish); a board game (“six-sided die” not included); and a map of Esteban (aka Pea Green) and Neon Red’s travels with Santa.
Haphazard but jolly enough for one outing; it probably won’t last for more. (Novelty. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51574-6
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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