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IZZY AND FRANK

Name: IZZY AND FRANK
Author: Katrina Lehman
ISBN: 978-1-950354-23-8

by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2020

Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones.

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Moving away from the island where she’s always lived, a little girl misses everything, especially her best friend.

Izzy loves living on an island in a lighthouse with a “staircase that twirled high into the sky.” Most of all, she loves her sea gull pal, Frank. On “gray-storm-rainy days,” they dig for buried treasure, play hide-and-seek, and draw in the sand. On “blue-sky-sunny days,” they swim with seals and hunt crabs or starfish. “Wild-wind-blowy days” they evade sea monsters and fight pirates. Then Izzy moves to the city, to a small house with “sharp corners” and no sea view. Izzy hates the city. The games other children play seem alien, and she must wear shoes and be quiet. She misses the wind, salt, sand, the lighthouse, the island, and, most of all, Frank. Izzy searches the streets and sky for Frank, and, one morning, he alights on her windowsill, ready to help her reinvent her life. Peppered with sensory images—“wind that whistled and wailed,” “crusty crabs,” and “sparkly, spiky starfish”—the alliterative text invites reading aloud. With its perky palette of aqua and orange, the simple, playful illustrations show Izzy as an exuberant white girl with freckles and unruly red curls who gradually adapts her free-spirited island life with Frank to an urban venue with new, diverse friends.

Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: July 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-950354-23-8

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Scribble

Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
WREN
by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer

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CARPENTER'S HELPER

by Sybil Rosen ; illustrated by Camille Garoche ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 2021

Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.

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A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.

Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: March 16, 2021

ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random

Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY

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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)