An energetic, frizzy-haired girl claims her quirkiness but wrestles with her family’s frequent moves. “I’m a bit unusual,” Sunday introduces herself to readers, skipping rope along a hopscotch grid while blowing a pink bubble. Her smile and airborne posture connote confidence, which helps at every new school. Imagination counters her isolation, turning an empty table into an Alice in Wonderland homage and a lonely field (other children seen together, in the distance) into companionable hand-swinging with a life-size elephant and bear. But feelings of ambivalence hover. Sunday’s proud of her career ambitions (fashion design featuring scuba flippers? soccer? space travel?) and skill at befriending girls, but the constant relocations upset her, no matter how “wonderfully glamorous” she calls her mobile life. Is this defensiveness, as it sounds like when she says, “boys smell, have germs, and probably love me,” or true mixed feelings? Blabey doesn’t answer that question, but his clear acrylics and mixed media ground Sunday’s excitements and worries—shown in extreme, sometimes manic, facial expressions—on soft, solid, comforting backgrounds. (Picture book. 4-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59078-597-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Front Street/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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In this deceptively spare, very beginning reader, a girl assembles a robot and then treats it like a slave until it goes on strike.
Having put the robot together from a jumble of loose parts, the budding engineer issues an increasingly peremptory series of rhymed orders— “Throw, Bot. / Row, Bot”—that turn from playful activities like chasing bubbles in the yard to tasks like hoeing the garden, mowing the lawn and towing her around in a wagon. Jung crafts a robot with riveted edges, big googly eyes and a smile that turns down in stages to a scowl as the work is piled on. At last, the exhausted robot plops itself down, then in response to its tormentor’s angry “Don’t say no, Bot!” stomps off in a huff. In one to four spacious, sequential panels per spread, Jung develops both the plotline and the emotional conflict using smoothly modeled cartoon figures against monochromatic or minimally detailed backgrounds. The child’s commands, confined in small dialogue balloons, are rhymed until her repentant “Come on home, Bot” breaks the pattern but leads to a more equitable division of labor at the end.
A straightforward tale of conflict and reconciliation for newly emergent readers? Not exactly, which raises it above the rest. (Easy reader. 4-6)Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-375-87083-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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BOOK REVIEW
Drawing on lyrics from her Mormon children’s hymn of the same title, Pearson explores diversity and acceptance in a more secular context.
Addressing people of varying ages, races, origins, and abilities in forced rhymes that omit the original version’s references to Jesus, various speakers describe how they—unlike “some people”—will “show [their] love for” their fellow humans. “If you don’t talk as most people do / some people talk and laugh at you,” a child tells a tongue-tied classmate. “But I won’t! / I won’t! / I’ll talk with you / and giggle too. / That’s how I’ll show my love for you.” Unfortunately, many speakers’ actions feel vague and rather patronizing even as they aim to include and reassure. “I know you bring such interesting things,” a wheelchair user says, welcoming a family “born far, far away” who arrives at the airport; the adults wear Islamic clothing. As pink- and brown-skinned worshipers join a solitary brown-skinned person who somehow “[doesn’t] pray as some people pray” on a church pew, a smiling, pink-skinned worshiper’s declaration that “we’re all, I see, one family” raises echoes of the problematic assertion, “I don’t see color.” The speakers’ exclamations of “But I won’t!” after noting others’ prejudiced behavior reads more as self-congratulation than promise of inclusion. Sanders’ geometric, doll-like human figures are cheery but stiff, and the text’s bold, uppercase typeface switches jarringly to cursive for the refrain, “That’s how I’ll show my love for you.” Characters’ complexions include paper-white, yellow, pink, and brown.
An unfortunately simplistic delivery of a well-intentioned message. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4236-5395-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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