An effervescent, rhyming case for positive thinking.
Fleming’s picture book offers youngsters tips on how to gauge what they truly want.
Professor Finelly McTueful, a wizard with a long gray beard and brown skin, offers his advice while hovering on a cloud above Egyptian pyramids, a polar iceberg, and, finally, on a desk in front of a blackboard. When you know what you don’twant, he says, then “in that moment precisely, // you’ll know what you DO want, / you’ll know it concisely.” By offering examples such as wanting a bully to be kind, wanting a liar to tell the truth, and wanting health when one is sick, the professor professes that knowing what you do want is “like having a map, / guiding you out / of that negative trap.” A pale-skinned boy then applies positive thinking to refocus on things that make him happy: his friends, a day at the beach, jokes, and imagination. Geyer’s full-color cartoon illustrations use light and shade to add nuance to the story’s examples. The little boy’s expressions in the illustrations when things go wrong validate his negative feelings, adding depth to the book’s overall emphasis on positivity. The rhyming and rhythm in Fleming’s text are effortless, occasionally adding challenging words to the mostly simple vocabulary (concisely, brutish).
An effervescent, rhyming case for positive thinking.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988910930
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Kahu Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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