An amazingly astute, artful unfurling of tightly coiled childhood social anxieties.
Joe worries the whole way to his first party, clutching the gift to his chest, furrowing his brow, and asking his mother, again and again, “What if…?”
They’ve lost the invitation with Tom’s address, setting them off on already-shaky ground. Trudging down his friend’s dark street, the two squint, trying to make out which door to approach. Joe’s anxious questions and his mother’s placating, mild responses appear in speech bubbles accompanying square panels that show their faces head-on. In delivering these snippets of intimacy, drawn flat and distilled in frames under the blue hues of twilight, Browne’s brilliance glows. As Joe and his mom work to bring each house’s interior into focus, readers both feel Joe’s anxiety heighten and see his fears take surreal shape on the page. Middle-class cottages with perfectly ordinary facades hold disturbing scenes and queer congregations, executed with marked specificity and unnerving clarity and color. Are those alien horns on that older bourgeois gent? Joe’s anxiety is sky-high by the time they finally find Tom’s door, leaving Mom to worry for the next two hours. At pickup time, Joe smiles, lit up inside and out, beaming golden yellow beyond the page borders, flooded with fun from a great party, one missed entirely by both Mom and readers.
An amazingly astute, artful unfurling of tightly coiled childhood social anxieties. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7419-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Not enough tricks to make this a treat.
Another holiday title (How To Catch the Easter Bunny by Adam Wallace, illustrated by Elkerton, 2017) sticks to the popular series’ formula.
Rhyming four-line verses describe seven intrepid trick-or-treaters’ efforts to capture the witch haunting their Halloween. Rhyming roadblocks with toolbox is an acceptable stretch, but too often too many words or syllables in the lines throw off the cadence. Children familiar with earlier titles will recognize the traps set by the costume-clad kids—a pulley and box snare, a “Tunnel of Tricks.” Eventually they accept her invitation to “floss, bump, and boogie,” concluding “the dance party had hit the finale at last, / each dancing monster started to cheer! / There’s no doubt about it, we have to admit: / This witch threw the party of the year!” The kids are diverse, and their costumes are fanciful rather than scary—a unicorn, a dragon, a scarecrow, a red-haired child in a lab coat and bow tie, a wizard, and two space creatures. The monsters, goblins, ghosts, and jack-o'-lanterns, backgrounded by a turquoise and purple night sky, are sufficiently eerie. Still, there isn’t enough originality here to entice any but the most ardent fans of Halloween or the series. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Not enough tricks to make this a treat. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72821-035-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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