Sensitive, stunning words and pictures speak directly to young hearts.
Lucid verse and transcendent monotype prints express how a heart can be “a window…a slide…closed / or opened up wide.”
Soothing, simple phrasing and masterful printmaking harness metaphors to make a heart’s complexity accessible to children just recognizing its many manifestations. Recurring rhyme provides an ideal cadence for reading aloud and also a reassuring assertion: Feelings can change from one moment to the next, your heart might sometimes be “cloudy and heavy with rain,” but just as the verse returns to rhyme, a heart can right itself. It "can grow,” and it “can mend, / and a heart that is closed can still open again.” Double-page spreads, inky with coal blacks and smudgy graphite grays, find luminosity and searing beauty through the introduction of a single color, an undauntedly optimistic ginkgo yellow that surges and glows. Pencil work adds specificity (freckles, eyeglasses, buttons, blades of grass) and sometimes emotional jaggedness (pelting rain, a steep, rickety slide). Young readers will see themselves in this impressive book’s children, kids of all racial backgrounds, who hide behind closed curtains, trudge through rain, extend a bouquet of small heart-shaped flowers, stand under the protective boughs of a wondrous tree. The final pages acknowledge a heart’s myriad, sometimes-incongruous roles (“a shadow, / a light, and a guide”) and joyfully assert our own, ultimate self-governance: “Closed or open… // I get to decide.”
Sensitive, stunning words and pictures speak directly to young hearts. (Picture book. 6-11)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2793-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
A fitting farewell, still funny, acute, and positive in its view of human nature even in its 37th episode.
A long-running series reaches its closing chapters.
Having, as Kline notes in her warm valedictory acknowledgements, taken 30 years to get through second and third grade, Harry Spooger is overdue to move on—but not just into fourth grade, it turns out, as his family is moving to another town as soon as the school year ends. The news leaves his best friend, narrator “Dougo,” devastated…particularly as Harry doesn’t seem all that fussed about it. With series fans in mind, the author takes Harry through a sort of last-day-of-school farewell tour. From his desk he pulls a burned hot dog and other items that featured in past episodes, says goodbye to Song Lee and other classmates, and even (for the first time ever) leads Doug and readers into his house and memento-strewn room for further reminiscing. Of course, Harry isn’t as blasé about the move as he pretends, and eyes aren’t exactly dry when he departs. But hardly is he out of sight before Doug is meeting Mohammad, a new neighbor from Syria who (along with further diversifying a cast that began as mostly white but has become increasingly multiethnic over the years) will also be starting fourth grade at summer’s end, and planning a written account of his “horrible” buddy’s exploits. Finished illustrations not seen.
A fitting farewell, still funny, acute, and positive in its view of human nature even in its 37th episode. (Fiction. 7-9)Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-451-47963-1
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lively fun with animal friends.
Has Plum’s pep deserted him?
Several animals from the Athensville Zoo are on their way to visit an elementary school. Overconfident Itch the ningbing (an Australian marsupial), unaware that zookeeper Lizzie will be doing all the talking, looks forward to “lecturing eager young minds.” Plum, the usually chipper peacock, on the other hand, is anxious—maybe the schoolchildren won’t like him or he’ll get lost. So when they arrive at the school to find the students have been sent home due to a blizzard, Plum is relieved. The animals are left in a school gym for the night until three self-important class mice free them. Itch heads for the library to meet the learned turtle, but Plum reluctantly explores with his friends. When his anxiety peaks, they reassure him, and when the mice reject Meg, another peacock, as “borrrring” and uncool, they buoy her as well before everyone comes together to save Itch, who finds himself outside and stranded in a snowdrift. Unlike Leave It to Plum (2022), this is not a mystery, and the relationship focus shifts from Lizzie to the rodents, but the pace is brisk, and sequel seekers will be pleased to revisit familiar characters (if dismayed that Itch’s longing for knowledge leads to his downfall). In Phelan’s engaging grayscale pen-and-wash illustrations, Lizzie has short curly hair; text and art cue her as Latine.
Lively fun with animal friends. (how to draw Plum) (Chapter book. 7-10)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-307920-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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