An immigrant story that heals wounds present and past.
A girl and her mother bridge a seemingly insurmountable gap.
Other girls have the things that Bao wants: beautiful, blond-haired dolls and mothers who joke and snuggle with their daughters. But Bao, a young Asian child with straight black hair in a bowl cut, has neither. There’s a palpable distance between her and Mama; on one spread, the two look in opposite directions as Mama explains, “When I was a little girl in Taiwan, we had nothing.” Bao has stopped listening; clearly the two don’t understand each other. Desperate, Bao takes matters into her own hands and shoplifts a coveted doll, but she’s caught immediately. A spread depicting a huge boulder between the two makes clear that the distance separating them has grown. But when Bao apologizes, Mama tells her about how she grew up in an orphanage, and Bao begins to understand her mother better. Mama shows Bao a box of items "filled with bittersweet memories," and as mother and daughter open up, they find common ground in sewing a new doll “from Mama’s memories and Bao’s hopes.” Lu’s illustrations are colorful and soft, with stylistically plump figures and airy textures. The red of Bao’s overalls and the blue of Mama’s dress dominate, with accents, colors, and sketchy grays bringing details into the fore- or background. Generational trauma looms large but is tempered by the optimistic ending.
An immigrant story that heals wounds present and past. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781419769214
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
As insubstantial as hot air.
A diverse cast of children first makes a fleet of hot air balloons and then takes to the sky in them.
Lifestyle maven Gaines uses this activity as a platform to celebrate diversity in learning and working styles. Some people like to work together; others prefer a solo process. Some take pains to plan extensively; others know exactly what they want and jump right in. Some apply science; others demonstrate artistic prowess. But “see how beautiful it can be when / our differences share the same sky?” Double-page spreads leading up to this moment of liftoff are laid out such that rhyming abcb quatrains typically contain one or two opposing concepts: “Some of us are teachers / and share what we know. / But all of us are learners. / Together is how we grow!” In the accompanying illustration, a bespectacled, Asian-presenting child at a blackboard lectures the other children on “balloon safety.” Gaines’ text has the ring of sincerity, but the sentiment is hardly an original one, and her verse frequently sacrifices scansion for rhyme. Sometimes it abandons both: “We may not look / or work or think the same, / but we all have an / important part to play.” Swaney’s delicate, pastel-hued illustrations do little to expand on the text, but they are pretty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.2-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70.7% of actual size.)
As insubstantial as hot air. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4003-1423-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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