A sturdy sequel about shortcuts that’s just different enough from its predecessor.
An ambitious child tries on different tails for different tasks in Kessides’ picture book.
Wally, the star of the author’s previous title, A Tail Tale (2025), returns with a new take on an old problem. The ambitious Wally is eager to use different animal tails to help him with a variety of tasks. When his mother asks him to do some chores, Wally speaks to the Tailor, who bestows upon him a monkey’s tail that enables him to do twice the work. Wally returns the appendage when he ends up extra exhausted and asks for a warm fox’s tail the following week when his father wants to go on a chilly camping trip. A family of foxes tries to lure him out of the tent, prompting Wally’s serpentine companion, Snoo, to remark, “I warned you!” (“Snoo was smart indeed, but Wally liked to try things for himself.”) Wally’s plan to wear a peacock tail to a wedding fares no better, but he is finally able to turn things around when he encounters an injured beaver in the woods. Each episode in this charming tale about the dangers of taking shortcuts is instructive and entertaining. As a whole, the story could flow more smoothly, and it’s disappointing that Snoo has little impact on any of the events. Gledhill portrays Wally as a white-skinned, brown haired boy in her simple, watercolor-like illustrations.
A sturdy sequel about shortcuts that’s just different enough from its predecessor.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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