A sparkling story whose fresh words and deeply imagined, skillfully rendered illustrations give it a feel that is both...
At the end of winter, the tired winter wind searches for “a place to rest.”
Inspired by a Yiddish story, author Marshall uses fresh language to reimagine this tale of the winter wind, exhausted after working all winter blowing leaves off trees and sculpting snow drifts for children, now looking for a respite. But all the places it tries to settle down—the cozy houses, a tree trunk, a rock—reject it because, of course, it’s the icy winter wind. When it rattles the windows of a remote cabin, frightening a young boy, the boy’s sister demands that the wind stop and tells her brother that “Wind is acting like a tired, angry baby.” The boy replies, with impeccable child logic, “Maybe Wind needs a nap?” The two children guide the wind to a cave, where the wind gratefully hunkers down. While the story is wonderfully inviting in itself, illustrator Doliveux’s images, created using dioramas constructed from cut-paper collage, then lit and photographed, are wondrous. Winter Wind is a swirling mass of paper strips in cool blues and whites with dark, expressive eyes. By contrast, the cozy rooms and houses are rendered in warm colors and steady lines to give viewers a sense of order and warmth. Both white and brown-skinned people are depicted.
A sparkling story whose fresh words and deeply imagined, skillfully rendered illustrations give it a feel that is both contemporary and folkloric. (author’s note) (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3788-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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