Endearing, engaging, and environmentalist.
A sequel to Billions of Bricks (2016) follows one family’s never-ending tree-planting project.
“We never meant to plant a tree,” says a brown-skinned kid with straight dark hair. Sister Lizzie, apparently White with light brown hair, asked for “a trillium, please,” but the plant store employee misheard her, dooming the siblings and their parents (who look like older versions of Lizzie) to a hopelessly huge arboreal job, planting the first shipment of 1,000 in batches of 100 wherever they can find room. While the narrator first appears oddly disembodied against a white background, the following full-bleed illustrations are detailed and dynamic. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to count 100 trees in a spread, no matter how well the illustrator spaces them out. The text also doesn’t make it totally clear that 10 hundreds add up to make “a thousand” by the end. Rather than a counting exercise, this book might better serve as an introduction to tree types: “Spruce and hemlock. Cedar, too. / A fir for her, a yew for you.” As in Billions, the kids join a multiracial group of neighbors, planting in parks, along roadsides, and even amid the remains of a fire. Turn the book vertically for one spread showing a full-grown sequoia. The rhymes aren’t quite as snappy as the ones in Billions, but they’re still fun. With any luck, the note that “there are more than three trillion trees in the world” will give readers enough of a sense of the 999,999,999,000-tree gap between a thousand and a trillion. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 45% of actual size.)
Endearing, engaging, and environmentalist. (tree facts) (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-22907-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Let these crayons go back into their box.
The Crayons return to celebrate Easter.
Six crayons (Red, Orange, Yellow, Esteban, who is green and wears a yellow cape, White, and Blue) each take a shape and scribble designs on it. Purple, perplexed and almost angry, keeps asking why no one is creating an egg, but the six friends have a great idea. They take the circle decorated with red shapes, the square adorned with orange squiggles “the color of the sun,” the triangle with yellow designs, also “the color of the sun” (a bit repetitious), a rectangle with green wavy lines, a white star, about which Purple remarks: “DID you even color it?” and a rhombus covered with blue markings and slap the shapes onto a big, light-brown egg. Then the conversation turns to hiding the large object in plain sight. The joke doesn’t really work, the shapes are not clear enough for a concept book, and though colors are delineated, it’s not a very original color book. There’s a bit of clever repartee. When Purple observe that Esteban’s green rectangle isn’t an egg, Esteban responds, “No, but MY GOSH LOOK how magnificent it is!” Still, that won’t save this lackluster book, which barely scratches the surface of Easter, whether secular or religious. The multimedia illustrations, done in the same style as the other series entries, are always fun, but perhaps it’s time to retire these anthropomorphic coloring implements. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Let these crayons go back into their box. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-62105-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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