Imaginative but eerie; the illustrations demand sturdy as well as fanciful readers.
A picture book about the antics of the imaginary night children.
This cyclic story tells of night children and their nighttime activities, which are, to put it prosaically, anthropomorphized natural events: “It is the night children who chase fireflies until the yard looks full of yellow stars….who rip the leaves off trees….who string gossamer webs across doorways and trees.” Tsiang’s lyric prose gently probes the mystery of the waking and sleeping worlds in her undeniably richly imagined story, but Bodet’s illustrations give it a darker tone. She renders the night children as ephemeral creatures shaped like human children, dressed alike in white and gray, and wearing monster-face hats pulled all the way down to their mostly expressionless mouths. She sets many scenes in stark—and dark—city streets, creating an atmosphere of mystery that verges on creepy. Both the writing and the illustrations work—but separately; the two don’t mesh well together. Tsiang’s words seem to tell of a night filled with innocent imaginative enchantment, while Bodet’s pictures give a scarier impression. The story ends in the light of day, with the city streets replaced by a comfortable suburb, which helps lighten the overall tone.
Imaginative but eerie; the illustrations demand sturdy as well as fanciful readers. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55451-723-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre.
Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.
The family picnic is today. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s; her Groundling father appears to be a white human. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. Desperate to avoid this, Lina and her friend Claudia, who is black, get Lina accepted at the Hilltop Science and Arts Academy. Lina’s parents allow her to go as long as she does lessons with grandpa on Saturdays. However, fitting in at a Groundling school is rough, especially when your powers start freak winter storms! With the story unfurling in diary format, bright-pink–highlighted grayscale illustrations help move the plot along. There are slight gaps in the storytelling and the pacing is occasionally uneven, but Lina is full of spunk and promotes self-acceptance.
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-35393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
A close encounter of the best kind.
Left behind when the space bus departs, a child discovers that the moon isn’t as lifeless as it looks.
While the rest of the space-suited class follows the teacher like ducklings, one laggard carrying crayons and a sketchbook sits down to draw our home planet floating overhead, falls asleep, and wakes to see the bus zooming off. The bright yellow bus, the gaggle of playful field-trippers, and even the dull gray boulders strewn over the equally dull gray lunar surface have a rounded solidity suggestive of Plasticine models in Hare’s wordless but cinematic scenes…as do the rubbery, one-eyed, dull gray creatures (think: those stress-busting dolls with ears that pop out when squeezed) that emerge from the regolith. The mutual shock lasts but a moment before the lunarians eagerly grab the proffered crayons to brighten the bland gray setting with silly designs. The creatures dive into the dust when the bus swoops back down but pop up to exchange goodbye waves with the errant child, who turns out to be an olive-skinned kid with a mop of brown hair last seen drawing one of their new friends with the one crayon—gray, of course—left in the box. Body language is expressive enough in this debut outing to make a verbal narrative superfluous.
A close encounter of the best kind. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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