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
Echoing Ashley Wolff’s 1988 approach to Stevenson’s poetic tribute to the power of imagination, Kirk begins with neatly drawn scenes of a child in a playroom, assembling large wooden blocks into, “A kirk and a mill and a palace beside, / And a harbor as well where my vessels may ride.” All of these acquire grand architectural details and toy-like inhabitants as the pages turn, until at last the narrator declares, “Now I have done with it, down let it go!” In a final twist, the young city-builder is shown running outside, into a well-kept residential neighborhood in which all the houses except his have been transformed into piles of blocks. Not much to choose between the two interpretations, but it’s a poem that every child should have an opportunity to know. (Picture book/poetry. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-689-86964-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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