A sweet and playful yet serious story.
In Rusu’s picture book, a young girl’s visit to her grandma’s goes wrong at every turn thanks to an obsessive compulsiveness that manifests as an imaginary robot friend.
The narrator, a young redheaded girl, wears robot-themed socks every day, and in doing so imagines a red robot companion constantly by her side: “My robot is AMAZING! / She makes things go just right / and always gets things done her way / from morning until night.” The robot is very particular about routines, which becomes problematic when the girl has to spend a day at her grandma’s. Grandma has the wrong type of soap, the wrong toys, and the wrong color of plate for the cookies: “I sneak a look at the pile of treats / on a blue plate by the sink. / BZZT. BOOP. BRRRR.‘NO! NO! NO!’ / ‘WE ONLY USE THE PINK!’” Will Grandma find a way to placate Robot and salvage the visit? Rusu and illustrator Morón tell a cute and relatable story, depicting not only the girl’s “difficult” behavior but also the condition that underlies it—expressed by way of the oversize, exaggeratedly emotive robot. Morón’s pen-and-ink images capture the protagonists’ personalities as well as the incidental action against uncluttered backdrops. Rusu’s text is rhythmically awkward at times and derives little benefit from being enslaved to an ABCB rhyme pattern. Nonetheless, the book deftly conveys its message and will pull young readers along.
A sweet and playful yet serious story.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780829457094
Page Count: 32
Publisher: 4U2B Books & Media
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite.
Humpty Dumpty, classically portrayed as an egg, recounts what happened after he fell off the wall in Santat’s latest.
An avid ornithophile, Humpty had loved being atop a high wall to be close to the birds, but after his fall and reassembly by the king’s men, high places—even his lofted bed—become intolerable. As he puts it, “There were some parts that couldn’t be healed with bandages and glue.” Although fear bars Humpty from many of his passions, it is the birds he misses the most, and he painstakingly builds (after several papercut-punctuated attempts) a beautiful paper plane to fly among them. But when the plane lands on the very wall Humpty has so doggedly been avoiding, he faces the choice of continuing to follow his fear or to break free of it, which he does, going from cracked egg to powerful flight in a sequence of stunning spreads. Santat applies his considerable talent for intertwining visual and textual, whimsy and gravity to his consideration of trauma and the oft-overlooked importance of self-determined recovery. While this newest addition to Santat’s successes will inevitably (and deservedly) be lauded, younger readers may not notice the de-emphasis of an equally important part of recovery: that it is not compulsory—it is OK not to be OK.
A validating and breathtaking next chapter of a Mother Goose favorite. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-682-6
Page Count: 45
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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BOOK REVIEW
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