This poetic celebration of the impermanence and unpredictability of seasons is a delight for pluviophiles and heliophiles...
Lyrical text invites friends to look closer and explore together as the seasons turn.
Outdoor play in a four-season climate requires flexibility and creativity due to changeable weather, and the children in this book are experts! A white boy and girl join a black boy and girl (gender cued via hairstyle and clothing) to go sledding in the snow, spy on animals emerging from deep wintry sleep, dig in thawing mud, watch clouds atop a flowery hill, soak in beachy sun, and leap into leaf piles. The children take turns being featured up close in painterly, gouache illustrations done in gently muted colors. Frosty breaths, breezes, and cottony clouds sometimes transform into recurring swirled motifs that contain birds, a unicorn, or a frosty deer. Endpapers further showcase the wind motif at the beginning amid raindrops and at the end amid snowflakes, underscoring the book’s temporal journey that begins on the front cover. Precise, descriptive couplets dance between descriptions of the fragility and unpredictability of nature and the dependability and strength of a deep friendship that is both interracial and ordinary. Young readers will find lots of ideas for how to explore their world throughout the year. Each spread also contains many natural elements that can be highlighted in STEM storytimes.
This poetic celebration of the impermanence and unpredictability of seasons is a delight for pluviophiles and heliophiles alike . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5918-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 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
BOOK REVIEW
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard.
A grouchy sapling on a Christmas tree farm finds that there are better things than lights and decorations for its branches.
A Grinch among the other trees on the farm is determined never to become a sappy Christmas tree—and never to leave its spot. Its determination makes it so: It grows gnarled and twisted and needle-less. As time passes, the farm is swallowed by the suburbs. The neighborhood kids dare one another to climb the scary, grumpy-looking tree, and soon, they are using its branches for their imaginative play, the tree serving as a pirate ship, a fort, a spaceship, and a dragon. But in winter, the tree stands alone and feels bereft and lonely for the first time ever, and it can’t look away from the decorated tree inside the house next to its lot. When some parents threaten to cut the “horrible” tree down, the tree thinks, “Not now that my limbs are full of happy children,” showing how far it has come. Happily for the tree, the children won’t give up so easily, and though the tree never wished to become a Christmas tree, it’s perfectly content being a “trick or tree.” Martinez’s digital illustrations play up the humorous dichotomy between the happy, aspiring Christmas trees (and their shoppers) and the grumpy tree, and the diverse humans are satisfyingly expressive.
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7335-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
