Amid swirls of brightly colored birds, bugs, seeds, leaves, wild creatures, buildings and people, a child ties her shoes, then goes out to plant, nurture and spread a garden—all to the tune of Johnston’s song-like verses: “I’ve got a little pair of shoes. / (How I love my little shoes!) / Got a little pair of shoes / to dance the whole green world.” Young children will happily dance along—if they can tear themselves away from Kleven’s paint and decorated-paper collages, that is. Her scenes build and build as each verse features another creature. Some serious searching will reveal repeat visitors, some upside down on the other side of the world and some in the farthest regions. Facing each busy scene, the words are encircled by whatever they salute—ants, the sun, even the phases of the moon. A bouncy, lyrical alternative or companion for the likes of David Mallett’s Inch By Inch: The Garden Song (1995), illus by Ora Eitan, or Frank Asch’s Earth and I (1994). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: April 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-38400-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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
``Water is dew. Water is ice and snow.'' No matter what form it takes, seldom has plain old water appeared so colorful as in this rainbow-hued look at rain, dew, snowflakes, clouds, rivers, floods, and seas. Asch celebrates water's many forms with a succinct text and lush paintings done in mostly in softly muted watercolors of aqua, green, rose, blue, and yellow. They look as if they were created with a wet-on-wet technique that makes every hue lightly bleed into its neighbor. Water appears as ribbons of color, one sliding into the other, while objects that are not (in readers' minds) specifically water-like—trees, rocks, roots—are similarly colored. Perhaps the author intends to show water is everything and everything is water, but the concept is not fully realized for this age group. The whole is charming, but more successful as art than science. Though catalogued as nonfiction, this title will be better off in the picture book section. (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-15-200189-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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