A quirky tale full of totally grape puns.
Two friends have a silly conversation.
A pale-skinned child holding a bunch of grapes meets up with an Asian-presenting friend in a park. “Is this a grape?” asks the first child. “It is shaped like a grape.” The second child agrees: “Of course. Every grape is shaped like a grape.” The first child replies, “I guess you could say it is in grape shape”—the first of many goofy puns. As the friends encounter a series of objects, the first child insists that each is a grape, or at least grape-shaped. Is that box grape-shaped? No, but what about the balloon inside? “It has to be a grape,” says the first child, “because if it were a balloon, you see, it would be raisin up in the sky.” The book takes an absurd turn as the pals visit a zoo and climb onto a giraffe (or is it a “tall-shaped grape”?) and then hitch a ride on a purple kite (a “kite-shaped grape”?). “This is a vine mess I have gotten us into,” says the first child before the two of them descend. Back at home, the second child asks why the first insisted that everything was a grape. “Because you are my friend…and I wanted you to have a grape day.” Tran’s artwork relies on dialogue bubbles in borderless panels of varying sizes; textured, soft colors outlined in white create a cozy, charming feel.
A quirky tale full of totally grape puns. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781250891419
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
Wild and wacky.
A picture book from the comedy duo known as Rhett & Link, creators of the online juggernaut Good Mythical Morning.
Lumo is obsessed with chicken fingers; Saffy, who is new to town and anxious about starting school, finds comfort in the only food she likes: buttered spaghetti. The night before the first day of school, a thunderstorm rages, and each kid makes a wish—“to have chicken fingers at school,” in Lumo’s case; Saffy wishes for “the first thing off the top of her head: buttered spaghetti.” File under “Be careful what you wish for.” Lumo’s and Saffy’s respective physical changes (chicken fingers for fingers, spaghetti for hair) make navigating school a challenge but bring them together in the cafeteria, where they enjoy some new foods—and their new friendship. The plotting could have been sharper: Why do the kids’ bodies suddenly return to normal? And couldn’t the authors have thought up a less old-hat story-ending punch line? Nevertheless, McLaughlin and Neal get by on their charm, and the plot sets up some funny visuals. Salcedo’s cartoony Photoshop art features well-chosen artifacts from a typical kid’s life and captures the mortification of not fitting in, which will be familiar even to readers who have never experienced breaded fingers or noodle hair. Lumo is brown-skinned and dark-haired; Saffy is pale-skinned with disheveled reddish-brown hair.
Wild and wacky. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9780063474154
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperPop/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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