A gentle read-aloud or independent read at day’s end.
A chair and a child form a bond that lasts over many years.
“The little red chair tightened its buttons, fluffed its tufts, and straightened its tiny brass wheels. Squeakity-squeak! Maybe today, thought the little red chair.” Just as Hans Christian Andersen brought to life an evergreen tree, the author does a fine job revealing the innermost thoughts of a chair. (Though, unlike Andersen’s tale, this one ends happily.) A girl named Mia persuades her mother to buy the chair, which has been languishing in an antiques shop and is in poor condition. Mia’s mother adeptly reupholsters the chair, and the child happily shines its brass wheels to perfection. A series of delightful illustrations accompany text that shows the chair’s many roles for Mia, including playing “tuffet to Mia’s Little Miss Muffet” and gradually becoming a repository for the teenage Mia’s belongings. The chair’s feelings are sometimes expressed in physical terms: its tufts fluff up with Mia’s vow of friendship and deplete when she hugs it farewell and leaves for college. More often, italicized phrases show the chair’s feelings, including exclamations such as “Squeakity-squee!” and “Squeakity-squish.” The clever latter phrase describes its moving-van trip when Mia’s parents move to a smaller home. The chair endures years of lonely attic time until the sweetly predictable, multigenerational ending. Simple but lyrical prose features the judicial use of repetition. Both Mia and her mother are light-skinned.
A gentle read-aloud or independent read at day’s end. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781534112902
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Relatable guidance for nocturnal worriers.
Actor and author Greenfield’s latest picture book follows a child kept awake by anxieties.
The pajama-clad narrator huddles in bed among the blue shadows of a bedroom at night. “Every time I close my eyes, I’m afraid of all the scary stuff I see.” Bright, candy-hued clouds of cartoon images surround the child, lively, disruptive depictions of the what-ifs and exaggerated disasters that crowd out sleep: war (we see the world pop “into a piece of popcorn”), kidnapping (pirates carry away the child’s teddy bear), falling “up” into the sun, tarantulas in the toilet, and a menacing-looking dentist. These outsize insomnia inducers may help readers put their own unvoiced concerns into perspective; after all, what frightens one person might seem silly but understandable to another. Our narrator tries to replace the unsettling thoughts with happy ones—hugging a baby panda, being serenaded by a choir of doughnuts, and “all the people who love me holding hands and wearing every piece of clothing that they own.” But sleep is still elusive. Finally, remembering that there’s a difference between reality and an overactive imagination, the child relaxes a bit: “Right now, everything is okay. And so am I.” Reassuring, though not exactly sedate, this tale will spark daytime discussions about how difficult it can be to quiet unsettling thoughts. The child has dark hair and blue-tinged skin, reflecting the darkness of the bedroom.
Relatable guidance for nocturnal worriers. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9780593697894
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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