There’s lots of eye candy in individual scenes, but the storyline is sketchy at best, making the whole rather less than the...
Curiosity about the flowers and animals, cars and buildings far below prompts the lonely Cloud Princess to descend for a closer look.
Leading off with a lenticular cover that adds 3-D layers to the princess’s luxuriant flows of white curls, the illustrations outshine the cursory plotline. Depicted as a pink-cheeked human child with huge, dark, almost mangalike eyes and a sad rosebud mouth, the fascinated princess floats downward accompanied by a flock of magenta birds to examine leaves and butterflies and to touch a flower with delicate fingers. But her hair suddenly begins to melt into rain. Miss Sun’s warning sends her scurrying skyward again…but doesn’t stop her from continuing to come down regularly, bringing with her the spring rains. Le endows Miss Sun, Miss Moon, and even the teal stars with faces, and she intersperses views of the bare-armed princess with scenes of earthly schoolchildren drawn with shorter, darker hair but similar features. The art is subject to abrupt transitions from one side of the gutter to the other, but all the sweet expressions and softly variegated colors throughout create delicate visual harmonies.
There’s lots of eye candy in individual scenes, but the storyline is sketchy at best, making the whole rather less than the sum of its parts. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60887-731-7
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Insight Editions
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on...
Continuing from their acclaimed Those Shoes (2007), Boelts and Jones entwine conversations on money, motives, and morality.
This second collaboration between author and illustrator is set within an urban multicultural streetscape, where brown-skinned protagonist Ruben wishes for a bike like his friend Sergio’s. He wishes, but Ruben knows too well the pressure his family feels to prioritize the essentials. While Sergio buys a pack of football cards from Sonny’s Grocery, Ruben must buy the bread his mom wants. A familiar lady drops what Ruben believes to be a $1 bill, but picking it up, to his shock, he discovers $100! Is this Ruben’s chance to get himself the bike of his dreams? In a fateful twist, Ruben loses track of the C-note and is sent into a panic. After finally finding it nestled deep in a backpack pocket, he comes to a sense of moral clarity: “I remember how it was for me when that money that was hers—then mine—was gone.” When he returns the bill to her, the lady offers Ruben her blessing, leaving him with double-dipped emotions, “happy and mixed up, full and empty.” Readers will be pleased that there’s no reward for Ruben’s choice of integrity beyond the priceless love and warmth of a family’s care and pride.
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on children. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6649-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd.
This British import is an imaginatively constructed sequence of images that show a white boy examining a city pavement, clearly in London, and the sights he would see if he were able to travel down to the Earth’s core and then back again to the surface.
The geologic layers are depicted in 10 vertical spreads that require a 90-degree turn to be read and include endpapers, which open out, concertina fashion, to show the interior of the Earth to its core. Beneath the urban setting are drains, pipes, and artifacts of urban infrastructure. Below that, archaeological relics are revealed. An Underground train speeds by, and below it, a stalactite-encrusted cave yawns. Deep below the Earth’s crust, magma, the Earth’s mantle, and the inner core are shown. Turn the page to start going up again, back through the mantle to the crust, where precious minerals are revealed, then fossils, tree roots, and animal burrows, ending with the same boy in the English countryside. The painted, stenciled, and collaged illustrations are full-bleed, and the tones graduate pleasantly from light colors at the surface of the Earth to rich pinks, yellows, and oranges as readers near the Earth’s core. The text is informative, if lacking in poetry, including such nuggets as “earthworms are expert recyclers, eating dead plants in the soil.”
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68297-136-9
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Words & Pictures
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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