An empowering, slice-of-life story about learning.
A child struggles with school when he can’t remember his colors in Seay’s illustrated book for children.
When Carter Carver, a young Black boy, asks his mother if she can teach him at home rather than send him to school, she’s surprised; she listens as Carter explains how he feels left out because he doesn’t know his colors by heart. Carter can remember the colors of many specific things (“You know like snowballs are white, blueberries blue, and firetrucks just have to be red”), but he often has to guess when it comes to identifying hues. Even though Carter is great at a lot of things, he’s worried that if his friends find out he doesn’t know his colors, they’ll laugh at him. Although his mother assures him that everyone learns at their own speed, she also helps him develop a new technique to help him learn which color is which. By bringing together toys of like colors, his mother personalizes color matching, showing Carter he can learn. The author uses a rhyming scansion and simple language to make the text accessible: “Carter never worried much about colors. He knew he could pass almost any test. To get around not telling one from the other, he had found different ways to guess.” The supportive environment relieves readers from worrying about Carter; even if he doesn’t get everything right, they know he is safe and loved. Seay’s colorful illustrations are bright and well textured. Carter solves his problem by the story’s end, but this is just the beginning of his educational journey; learning his colors gives him the encouragement he needs to keep going.
An empowering, slice-of-life story about learning.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798986344706
Page Count: 34
Publisher: PicBooks Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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