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
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
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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