If the text is occasionally sentimental or overwritten, the pictures are so simple they’re heartbreaking.
This is a picture book about loss and grief, so it is probably not a coincidence that it is pictorially dominated by skies.
Santoso paints amazing skies. There’s a spectacular view of the sky on almost every page of the story. When the sky isn’t visible, it’s usually reflected in a pool of water. They’re city skies, so the clouds are shaped like buses and taxis, but sometimes they look like bears chasing each other through the air. This is apt, as the main characters in the book are Gus and Ida, two polar bears living in the city zoo. Some days, Ida is too weak to swim or play, and sometimes she coughs or sleeps too long. The book is very blunt about what’s happening: “one day, when her body stopped working, Ida would die.” Levis writes about death and the bears’ mutual devotion with surprising beauty: “There were growling days and laughing days / and days that mixed them up.” But some of the most affecting passages are hardly poetic at all. Gus’ distress is emphasized in large, bold type: “ ‘Don’t go,’ he growled. ‘Don’t go, don’t go…DON’T!’ ” The final image shows Gus beneath a cloud shaped like a lone bear. The text says: “And Ida is right there. Always.”
If the text is occasionally sentimental or overwritten, the pictures are so simple they’re heartbreaking. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-2640-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
A thoughtful, candid look at self-reflection.
Sometimes this sunflower seed can be just plain rotten!
The book’s self-professed scoundrel opens with a warning. “I’m a bad seed. / A baaaaaaaaaaad seed.” Even other seeds whisper in agreement: that’s one bad seed. What makes this seed so bad? Well, he’s always late and lies often. He stares and glares and never listens. He cuts in line all the time and never washes his hands or feet. And he does other horrible things too bad to list. Young readers (and some older ones as well) will chuckle at the list of misdeeds, then perhaps wonder whether they’re guilty of such baaaaaaaaaaad behavior themselves, but John aims for more fruitful ground. What makes a seed go bad? A tragic back story provides at least one reason for the badness. When the rogue seed decides “to be happy” by doing good, it’s not so hard to cheer for him. Loudly. The change may seem abrupt, although there is a sense that being good takes time. Throughout the story, Oswald’s digital, watercolor-infused illustrations keep the focus exclusively on the titular bad seed, depicting the world around him hilariously reacting to his misbehavior and using close-ups—sometimes extreme ones—for comical effect. Small moments of goodness appear that much more profound as a result.
A thoughtful, candid look at self-reflection. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-246776-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a crowded subgenre, this offering is unnecessary.
Anger at a sibling gets taken out on a friend.
Protagonist Keya fumes when younger brother Nate gives Keya’s cereal to the dog and cuts holes in Keya’s favorite hat. Keya stomps outside. Hooper, Keya’s friend, offers a cheerful greeting, but Keya darts away. A fantasy race ensues, briefly cathartic, but Keya’s temper explodes after a knee-scraping tumble. Keya bursts out, “I don’t like you, Hooper.” It’s not true, of course, and they make up after a sweetly responsible apology. Aside from twice waxing poetic (“The kind of mad that starts / and swells / and spreads like a rash”), Adelman’s prose is dull and declarative (“Then we joked and laughed. I was so happy”). Keya and her family present white and Hooper, black. Keya’s glorious, lively black curls are de la Prada’s best visual. Many illustrations are too uniformly saturated, with the composition offering no clear place to focus. A “gold medal like sunshine” that Keya wins in the imagined race is barely visible. In a critical misstep for a book for fostering emotional literacy, narrator Keya says Hooper looks “way past mad”—echoing an earlier description of Keya—while the illustrations clearly show him as hurt, not angry. Choose Tameka Fryer Brown and Shane Evans’ My Cold Plum Lemon Pie Bluesy Mood (2013) or Judith Viorst and Ray Cruz’s classic Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (1972) instead.
In a crowded subgenre, this offering is unnecessary. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8075-8685-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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