This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Echoing Ashley Wolff’s 1988 approach to Stevenson’s poetic tribute to the power of imagination, Kirk begins with neatly drawn scenes of a child in a playroom, assembling large wooden blocks into, “A kirk and a mill and a palace beside, / And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.” All of these acquire grand architectural details and toy-like inhabitants as the pages turn, until at last the narrator declares, “Now I have done with it, down let it go!” In a final twist, the young city-builder is shown running outside, into a well-kept residential neighborhood in which all the houses except his have been transformed into piles of blocks. Not much to choose between the two interpretations, but it’s a poem that every child should have an opportunity to know. (Picture book/poetry. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-689-86964-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
Aspiring astronauts will be starstruck.
Personable planets and animated astronomical bodies introduce themselves in spirited verse.
Dawnay presents 10 poems of regular four-beat rhyming couplets (iambs and anapests), with a fact-filled page after each chapter. In proud, sometimes sassy voices, personified celestial bodies directly address readers; among them, the characters we meet are the moon, Earth, the entire solar system, the four “rocky” terrestrial planets, the four gas giants, the “remnants” (asteroids, meteoroids, comets, debris), the Milky Way, the sun, the five dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris), and finally a nebula cloud, a “nursery” for new planetary bodies. The bright, cheerful illustrations stylize the astral objects. Stars have sharp points; the nebula beams. Eyebrows and lashes adorn some eyes, while others are round or almond-shaped. Usually the heavenly bodies are simply round faces, but an occasional hand or tongue protrudes. Colors can convey astronomical information: Saturated blues suggest the depths of space or the gaseous ice giants; red, the iron of Mars or hot meteors (but cold Jupiter is also red); green, Earth’s vegetation. These versified vehicles for information are impressively precise and enlightening.
Aspiring astronauts will be starstruck. (further reading) (Nonfiction. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781419779688
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Magic Cat
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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