Buzz on by this one.
Two die-cut cardboard worker bees accompany readers through an introduction to honeybees.
They are set into shaped holes in the cover and attached to the book with yellow ribbons, but subsequent pages give them no real place to rest or otherwise interact with the text, reducing them to glorified bookmarks. The bees speak to readers in the first-person plural, imparting basic information in a series of declarative sentences. Unfortunately, odd phrasing combines with oversimplification for a bumpy ride. “We fly from flower to flower spreading pollen dust,” for instance, both neglects the bees’ gathering of pollen as a foodstuff and adds the wholly unnecessary “dust,” mischaracterizing the substance. They do “a dance called the Waggle”—like the Charleston?—rather than a waggle dance, and its description is brushed in very broad strokes. In the hive, they “chew flower nectar”—a liquid and therefore unchewable—“to make honey” rather than performing the complicated enzymatic process that actually takes place. Dove’s illustrations depict an impossible hive (an old-fashioned straw one bisected by a branch) rather than a modern wooden hive or an actual feral nest. While most in the board-book audience are likely not to know the difference, to present them with vague, fact-adjacent information and active untruths for the sake of a gimmick that doesn’t work particularly well does them a disservice. If it’s too complicated to communicate clearly, don’t bother trying.
Buzz on by this one. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6892-0
Page Count: 14
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Ho-hum.
A riff on the familiar lullaby depicts various animal parents, and then a human father, soothing their sleepy little ones.
An opening spread includes the traditional first verse of the titular lullaby, but instead of depicting a human baby in a treetop cradle, the accompanying illustration shows a large tree as habitat to the animals that are highlighted on subsequent pages. First the perspective zooms in on a painterly illustration rendered in acrylics of a mother squirrel cuddling her baby with text reading “Rock-a-bye Squirrel, / high in the tree, / in Mommy’s arms, / cozy as can be.” In this spread and others the cadence doesn’t quite fit with the familiar tune, and repeated verses featuring different animals—all opening with the “Rock-a-bye” line—don’t give way to the resolution. No winds blow, no boughs break, and the repetitive forced rhythm of the verse could cause stumbles when attempting a read-aloud. The final image of a human father and baby, whose skin tone and hair texture suggest that they are perhaps of South Asian descent, provides pleasing visual resolution in a book with art that outshines text.
Ho-hum. (Picture book. 2-4)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3753-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Handsome but so sneaky as to be frustrating.
Youngsters are invited to find the object or creature that doesn’t fit in with a similar grouping of animals.
In arrays spread out on (mostly) double-page spreads, a rocking horse hides among a drove of real horses, a cat sits with a variety of breeds of dogs, and so on. The project is wordless except for the introductory text that introduces the game with echoes of Sesame Street: “One of these things is almost like the others….” Some of the groupings are quite clever: a straight belt is placed amid a row of curvy snakes, a mechanical crane is perched between a living crane and two other long-legged birds, and the sole human figure, who looks to be a shirtless white male, is the only being to walk on two legs in a primate troop. To assist guessers, the final double-page spread shows all the outliers from the subsequent groupings. Using only yellow, purple, and a deep and dusky brown that is created when these two shades are mixed, Contraire uses stencils to create his figures against a creamy white background. While many of the animals and objects are instantly recognizable, the contrast of the mostly yellow critters against white backgrounds makes identification tricky for the board-book set. And while the book design is handsome, the lack of color variation in the art gives the offering a one-note feel.
Handsome but so sneaky as to be frustrating. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: May 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7148-7422-7
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Phaidon
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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