In three short chapters of just a few words each, Lobel demonstrates her artistry for choosing the right ingredients to create a perfect concept book around the life of a small gray-striped cat. “All Week Long,” the first story or chapter, presents not only the days of the week, but also colors, and in the process, accomplishes a fine assessment of one little girl's activities by focusing, cat’s-eye view, on her footwear. Tuesday's flashy red cowboy boots take her bike-riding, and Saturday’s demure pink toe shoes inspire Nini, the cat, to lift an elegant paw and so on. The second segment, “Nini's Year,” evokes much more about months than simply their names, even during March, when the howling winds Nini listens to wouldn't seem to give an ordinary artist much to go on visually. The surprise here is the Nini of December, who “waited for good things,” and proudly accepts her holiday gifts—three gray-striped kittens. The titular third story may seem a book-bulking appendage or a pretext for including number concepts, but it is also the necessary expansion of Nini's world, for she is a cat of the outdoors. Here her presence is diminished so that sometimes only a head peeps from the edges of white-framed illustrations depicting life around her home near a lighthouse. The book's culminating spread shows one moon smiling at a 100-starred cat constellation above a very tiny cat. There's neither a missing elementary concept nor a jarring fly in the ointment of this bewitching cat's charmed life. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: April 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15539-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A series of rollicking riddles with unexpected answers. In the first spread, the picture on the left apparently shows a rabbit in silhouette while the short verse on the right provides the clues: “He steals carrots... / His floppy ears are long and funny. / Can you guess who? That’s right! My….” Turn the page for the answer: “Grandpa Ned.” (Ned’s upside-down, with socks half-pulled off to resemble rabbit ears.) Grandpa Ned turns up twice more, as the answer to a riddle that seems to be about a cat and later as the setup answer to another riddle. The book’s four other riddles involve a pirate, snow creatures, a mouse hole and a dark cave. A lifting flap and a gatefold add tactile interest. Rex’s straightforward gouache-and–mixed-media illustrations downplay the mischief of the premise, appropriately lobbing visual softballs at an audience disoriented by the goof on a tried-and-true formula they’ve encountered over and over. In all, it’s a refreshing (albeit slight) spoof for jaded young readers who have aced easy Q&A books; some may find it too cool for the room. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-5566-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
