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MY BABA'S GARDEN

Name: MY BABA'S GARDEN
Author: Jordan Scott
ISBN: 978-0-8234-5083-1

by Jordan Scott ; illustrated by Sydney Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 2023

A quiet, tender, and profoundly moving celebration of intergenerational love.

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This tale based on Scott’s boyhood experiences with his Polish grandmother traces the daily routines of a child and their beloved Baba.

In her first appearance, Baba is bathed in the sunlight streaming through her kitchen window, a bent Madonna in a sweater and slippers. She brings the young narrator a large bowl of oatmeal with pickles, cabbage, and beets before they walk to school, a jar at the ready to collect worms for Baba’s garden. Later, the child wonders why she does this, and Baba dips her finger into rainwater and traces the lines on the youngster’s hand. Author and illustrator allow readers to discern how communication occurs in the absence of a common spoken language—and what it means. The protagonist’s mother offers context when she relays that the garden and the presence of food in every nook and cranny result from earlier scarcity. Scott’s poetic sensibilities distill the days into meaningful moments and images, sometimes captured in similes: The woman “hums like a night full of bugs.” Smith’s warm gouache-and-watercolor scenes are filled with gentle gestures and connection. Later, when Baba moves in with the family, a wordless sequence—in which her grandchild brings her breakfast—is a beautifully crafted callback to the poignant ritual seen earlier in the story. Characters are tan-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

A quiet, tender, and profoundly moving celebration of intergenerational love. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-7)

Pub Date: March 7, 2023

ISBN: 978-0-8234-5083-1

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House

Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
ANGELA'S GLACIER
by Jordan Scott ; illustrated by Diana Sudyka

- BOOK REVIEW
I TALK LIKE A RIVER
by Jordan Scott ; illustrated by Sydney Smith

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ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Laura Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
ON THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Sarah Jennings

- BOOK REVIEW
FIVE LITTLE BUNNIES
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Dan Yaccarino

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LOVE FROM THE CRAYONS

by Drew Daywalt ; illustrated by Oliver Jeffers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2019

As ephemeral as a valentine.

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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)