This sweet and gentle bedtime story, reinforced by soft pastel backgrounds and simple ink illustrations, assures young...
A debut picture book offers a letter to an eagerly awaited child.
The opening words are the work’s title, as an expectant mother sits in a rocking chair, looking fondly at a teddy bear. Accompanied by an image of tiny hands grabbing adult fingers, the text continues: “I loved your tiny hands and couldn’t wait to hold them.” Author Bear continues with each feature of the infant that’s so keenly anticipated: feet to kiss, smiles to see, baby noises to hear, and naps to watch in stillness and admiration. After the baby is born, there is even more love to be shared, and each of those items is revisited. Now the parent addressing the child gets to do, feel, and see all those things described previously. Robinson’s shaded ink drawings feature a variety of diverse parents and babies. The black-and-white art is contrasted with the watercolor backgrounds by Katelyn Bear (the author’s daughter), giving subtle blends of color to the backgrounds, primarily in pastels. While this lacks the sharp juxtaposition supposedly most enticing to infants, the delicate patterns and serene bursts of color are soothing, perfectly matching the comforting tone of the text. The sentences follow a pattern, the first set beginning with “I loved your”; the second, repeating the noun of the first, starts with or includes “I get to.” Those recurring words and activities reinforce the vocabulary for the youngest audiences. The tone of the phrases also gives the listener the sense that whoever is reading the story feels lucky and privileged to have that child as part of the family’s life, to be adored. Despite all the exclamation points, the appealing book creates the lulling message that affection has no limits.
This sweet and gentle bedtime story, reinforced by soft pastel backgrounds and simple ink illustrations, assures young listeners that they have always been surrounded by love.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5255-0568-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister:...
A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.
Coraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. This is Gaiman’s (American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears—and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. “I will be brave,” thinks Coraline. “No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother; she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own—and every child’s own—reality. As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing.
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97778-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
