A joy-filled celebration of an exciting and even nurturing urban landscape. The narrator, Emi, launches on the endpapers her story of the ``longest walk,'' a trip she made with her father and her best friend, an African-American girl named Martha. From their friendly, familiar Chinatown block in New York City they travel up to Washington Square Park, past the Flatiron building, up to the Empire State Building``Martha swore you could see King Kong.'' They pass 52nd Street where ``Bird and Diz and Monk'' once played. They visit the Museum of Modern Art. Finally they reach Central Park and ride the carousel. Emi's father sketches the boat pond and makes paper boats for all the children; he folds paper cranes during the bus ride home as the lights come on in the buildings around them. The paintings form an appealing view of the big city: colorful, pulsing, filled with child-pleasing details and shifting points of view. This is no golden, lost childhood (although the bus ride seems to cost them 5õ each). As was true in the early works of Ezra Jack Keats, the child-heroes welcome every adventure before them; Hamanaka makes the journey uplifting and the road home safe. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-80288-9
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
Dedicated “to children everywhere sitting in cardboard boxes,” this elemental debut depicts a bunny with big, looping ears demonstrating to a rather thick, unseen questioner (“Are you still standing around in that box?”) that what might look like an ordinary carton is actually a race car, a mountain, a burning building, a spaceship or anything else the imagination might dream up. Portis pairs each question and increasingly emphatic response with a playscape of Crockett Johnson–style simplicity, digitally drawn with single red and black lines against generally pale color fields. Appropriately bound in brown paper, this makes its profound point more directly than such like-themed tales as Marisabina Russo’s Big Brown Box (2000) or Dana Kessimakis Smith’s Brave Spaceboy (2005). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-112322-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
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