A handsome volume offering conversation starters, writing prompts, or thoughtful browsing pleasure.
The prolific German picture-book creator here fills nearly 200 pages with contemplative questions—and corresponding images.
While some spreads pair a single thought and illustration in a verso/recto pattern, other ideas are examined over several pages. The book opens and concludes with children on chairs, first musing about growing up, later dreaming; also near the end are youth on a tightrope (acknowledging fear) and swing (aiming high). Some questions deal with the everyday, tangible, or familiar realm: “What if the winter never ends?”; “Why are they so mean to me?” Others are more existential: “When somebody is very old and dies, / and a tree grows out of his grave, / is he then the tree?” Teckentrup maintains interest with ever changing page designs punctuated with white space. Her beautifully textured, layered compositions are created by scanning and digitally composing art that has been printed and painted by hand. While the palette changes with the mood, the art is tonally consistent, lending an overall unity. Skin tones range from realistic (brown) to the fantastic (blue or decorated, i.e., a starlit silhouette). The variety of questions ensures that a wide swath of reflective readers will find something to ponder, whether it is “Will he like me?” as subsequent pages show two (possibly) boys getting closer to kissing or the rhetorical “Do birds like to fly?”
A handsome volume offering conversation starters, writing prompts, or thoughtful browsing pleasure. (Picture book. 6-adult)Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-3-7913-7376-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Prestel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
A kind child in a book for middle-grade readers? There’s no downside to that.
Beatrice Zinker is a kinder, gentler Judy Moody.
Beatrice doesn’t want to be fit in a box. Her first word was “WOW,” not “Mom.” She does her best thinking upside down and prefers to dress like a ninja. Like Judy Moody, she has patient parents and a somewhat annoying younger brother. (She also has a perfectly ordinary older sister.) Beatrice spends all summer planning a top-secret spy operation complete with secret codes and a secret language (pig Latin). But on the first day of third grade, her best friend, Lenny (short for Eleanor), shows up in a dress, with a new friend who wants to play veterinarian at recess. Beatrice, essentially a kind if somewhat quirky kid, struggles to see the upside of the situation and ends up with two friends instead of one. Line drawings on almost every spread add to the humor and make the book accessible to readers who might otherwise balk at its 160 pages. Thankfully, the rhymes in the text do not continue past the first chapter. Children will enjoy the frequent puns and Beatrice’s preference for climbing trees and hanging upside down. The story drifts dangerously close to pedantry when Beatrice asks for advice from a grandmotherly neighbor but is saved by likable characters and upside-down cake. Beatrice seems to be white; Lenny’s surname, Santos, suggests that she may be Latina; their school is a diverse one.
A kind child in a book for middle-grade readers? There’s no downside to that. (Fiction. 6-10)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4847-6738-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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