A clever, irresistible, visually engaging search-and-find exercise.
Before Grandad can take his two grandchildren to the park, he needs their help to find various personal items he’s lost.
Locating Grandad’s misplaced socks, shoes, dentures, glasses, umbrella, tote bag, bow tie, pocket watch, keys, hat, and mobile phone in his enormous house, filled from floor to ceiling with a bizarre assembly of peculiar possessions, becomes a daunting exercise for all concerned. Inviting reader participation, the text offers clues and directs the hunt, beginning in the green living room and progressing to the red kitchen, yellow bathroom, pink drawing room, blue hallway, pink and gray study, purple reading room, brown attic, and green greenhouse before ending in the magenta mezzanine. Grandad’s missing items appear collectively in the frontispiece, but they are later diabolically concealed within the welter of lines and patterns adorning the incredibly detailed illustrations. Adding to the visual confusion, everything in each room (except Grandad and his silently searching grandchildren, all anthropomorphic dogs) appears in the same bold color, artfully camouflaging the lost items. Red shoes in an overcrowded red kitchen could be anywhere. Is there really a pink-and-gray bow tie somewhere in the pink and gray study? Where’s the green hat with the feather in the greenhouse teeming with green plants? Will the grandchildren and readers ever locate Grandad’s missing gear?
A clever, irresistible, visually engaging search-and-find exercise. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-99921-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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