A heartwarming adventure rolls along in a delightful rhythmic verse.
A snowy afternoon prompts a sled ride back to town through the countryside for a grandmother visiting her family.
On the morning after Grandma’s sleepover, the blizzard results in a snow day, allowing the two young grandchildren to accompany Grandma to her town house via a homemade chair sled. Grandma is quite the strong, energetic elder as they make their way through the snowy woods and onto the busy, buried streets of her neighborhood. Two-word sentences in abcb rhyme patterns, one stanza per page, tell this seasonal story with a cadence that captures both the captivating beauty of a glistening wood and the snowy dunes of a blanketed city street. “When the snow falls…. // Woods hush. / Fields glisten. / Wren sings. / We listen”; “When the snow falls… / Trains toot. / Cars slow. / Plows push. / Mountains grow.” After everyone helps Grandpa, waiting back at home, to shovel and dig out, it’s time for sledding, snow angels, and snowmen in the park, followed by warm soup, cocoa, and cuddles. Digitally colored and assembled pencil drawings offer wintry rural and urban scenes in icy blues and whites. This mixed-race happy family’s enjoyment of all the fun and exertion a snowstorm bring spills from each double-page spread. Grandpa is the only white family member; everyone else has skin of varying shades of warm brown and tightly curled hair.
A heartwarming adventure rolls along in a delightful rhythmic verse. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54720-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Let these crayons go back into their box.
The Crayons return to celebrate Easter.
Six crayons (Red, Orange, Yellow, Esteban, who is green and wears a yellow cape, White, and Blue) each take a shape and scribble designs on it. Purple, perplexed and almost angry, keeps asking why no one is creating an egg, but the six friends have a great idea. They take the circle decorated with red shapes, the square adorned with orange squiggles “the color of the sun,” the triangle with yellow designs, also “the color of the sun” (a bit repetitious), a rectangle with green wavy lines, a white star, about which Purple remarks: “DID you even color it?” and a rhombus covered with blue markings and slap the shapes onto a big, light-brown egg. Then the conversation turns to hiding the large object in plain sight. The joke doesn’t really work, the shapes are not clear enough for a concept book, and though colors are delineated, it’s not a very original color book. There’s a bit of clever repartee. When Purple observe that Esteban’s green rectangle isn’t an egg, Esteban responds, “No, but MY GOSH LOOK how magnificent it is!” Still, that won’t save this lackluster book, which barely scratches the surface of Easter, whether secular or religious. The multimedia illustrations, done in the same style as the other series entries, are always fun, but perhaps it’s time to retire these anthropomorphic coloring implements. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Let these crayons go back into their box. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-62105-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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