Adequate if overly busy.
Get an insider’s look at nocturnal life in this die-cut board book.
Touching briefly on various facets of human and animal nightlife, pages range from a farmer milking cows “before sunrise” while the rooster cock-a-doodle-doos to more natural settings, such as wetlands with bats hunting and frogs singing. There’s plenty to see on the busy pages—perhaps too much. Besides the primary text of accurate but generic statements about night, small bubbles filled with questions such as “What noise do frogs make?” or small factoids informing readers that “Frogs like to sing at night” hover arbitrarily about the page. With the different typefaces and text formats, pages lack visual focus, especially when print is sprinkled among the many mildly anthropomorphized animals and hectic backgrounds. Some die cuts are equally strained. While the largest center die cut effectively creates the illusion of a layered night sky, the fiddly, teeny die cuts sporadically placed across the page are too small to show much clearly and are sometimes misaligned from the picture underneath. Semirealistic illustrations with a Little Golden Book vibe are competent and capture the night environs reasonably well, and the extra-thick cardboard pages seem ready for tough toddler handling. Another book in the series, What Can You See? On the Farm, shares the same whimsical animals and chaotic format.
Adequate if overly busy. (Board book. 2-4 )Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68010-615-2
Page Count: 12
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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