A touching portrait of the fall season from two superb artists.
Author-illustrator duo Henkes and Dronzek extol the quiet splendors of autumn in this lyrical, exquisite complement to their previous seasonal outing, When Spring Comes (2016).
Its crown full of reddish-orange leaves, a tree stands against a gray sky. “In the middle of Fall, / when the leaves / have already turned,” the narrator begins. Measured and understated, Henkes’ text masterfully raises and stirs moods and sensations in pieces, each building on top of the other. A fair-skinned child in a red hooded sweatshirt and yellow boots sits on a swing, a brown dog sitting on the ground nearby. Squirrels scurry about, gardens wither, and pumpkins “are ready” as various children pluck them off the ground. All it takes is “just one big gust of wind,” says the wistful narrator, and suddenly “everything is yellow / and red / and orange.” Solid lines and deep autumnal colors abound in Dronzek’s gorgeous acrylic illustrations, which fill the spaces left untouched by the text. In pace and richness, text and pictures dreamily embody the essence of fall, which in this book marks a transition both bittersweet and inevitable. Enjoy the child and dog at play throughout these autumn landscapes, because before either of them knows it (and perhaps before readers realize it as well), change will come again.
A touching portrait of the fall season from two superb artists. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-257311-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
As ephemeral as a valentine.
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)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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