Perhaps these peas have simply pea-tered out.
Baker’s industrious pea-ple are back for a fifth tour, this time delivering an A-to-Z look at work and play.
Colorful, digitally textured lowercase letters loom large against white space, cleverly integrated into the action. Firefighters use a ladder truck to train a hose on a small fire high atop the letter F. An S—strapped to the roof of a school bus filled with book-toting students—sports a row of saluting soldiers up on top. Among the standard community helpers, from architects to window washers, Baker inserts a bit of whimsy: there are pirates, a queen, and five “X-Peas” exhibiting their superpowers. There’s some deliberate, anthropomorphized diversity: a violinist is female (or at least has a ponytail) and uses a wheelchair; one soldier appears female (with hair in a bun), and most work crews have some female peas (so to speak). Genders are suggested by hairstyles, props, and purses. Depicting “jailbirds” for J seems jarringly tone-deaf. Three peas in stereotyped black-and-white striped uniforms peer sadly from a multilevel barred building topped with barbed wire; the letter itself is also incarcerated. (A guard snoozes in a chair below, while a smiling janitor mops the floor.) Admittedly, there’s fun for kids to discover here—from the vegetable horde’s teeming activities to a ladybug that appears on each double-page spread—but the text scans erratically, making for clunky read-alouds.
Perhaps these peas have simply pea-tered out. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5856-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color.
Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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