Fewer selections (32 vs. 38), shorter verses, full-color illustrations, and an absence of the serious poems of If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand (1990) gear Dakos's collection to a younger audience than her earlier work. The poems are energetic, upbeat, and have a humorous slant on the trials and triumphs of the primary years. Perhaps the titles tell all: ``Mrs. Wren Lost Her Glasses Again,'' ``The Day Before I Wear the Birthday Crown All Day in School,'' ``Muddy Recess,'' ``Elemenopee,'' ``I Lost My Tooth in My Doughnut,'' ``My Project's in the Toilet,'' ``There's Something in My Book Bag, and It's Slimy.'' The poems are varied in form—some have regular meters and rhyme schemes, while others are written in free verse. Many of them make use of repetition, so they will be easy for early readers to enjoy, memorize, and recite. With artwork as kinetic and multicolored as the graphics on ``Nickelodeon,'' this volume will appeal to those who appreciate the anything-can-happen environment of Miss Nelson's classroom or the Magic School Bus. (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-02-725583-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Iffy art cramps this 25th-anniversary reissue of the joyful title poem from Greenfield’s first collection (1978), illustrated by the Dillons. As timeless as ever, the poem celebrates everything a child loves, from kissing Mama’s warm, soft arm to listening to a cousin from the South, “ ’cause every word he says / just kind of slides out of his mouth.” “I love a lot of things / a whole lot of things,” the narrator concludes, “And honey, / I love ME, too.” The African-American child in the pictures sports an updated hairstyle and a big, infectious grin—but even younger viewers will notice that the spray of cool water that supposedly “stings my stomach” isn’t aimed there, and that a comforter on the child’s bed changes patterns between pages. More problematic, though, is a dropped doll that suddenly acquires a horrified expression that makes it look disturbingly like a live baby, and the cutesy winged fairy that hovers over the sleeping child in the final scene. The poem deserves better. (Picture book/poetry. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-009123-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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