Moving and evocative visual storytelling.
A little girl tries to construct an aquarium for her new fish in this wordless Portuguese import by an Argentine artist.
Following a path from her house to a riverside dock, the girl stares intently into the water and imagines swimming amid fish of varying shapes, sizes, and colors. When a sprightly red fish leaps onto the dock, she captures it and carries it home, where she attempts to assemble an aquarium. Surrounded by assorted containers, hoses, and puddles, the girl dons her bathing suit, hoping to replicate the experience of swimming with her fish. When her fish flips out of the inflatable pool into a puddle, the girl realizes her venture isn’t working. Reluctantly, she returns the wee red fish to the river. In this wordless story, illustrations convey setting, character, plot, and emotion through flat patterns, simple lines, and a contained palette of pinks, blues, and golds, rendered in pencil and pen and digitally. Deep tones and bold patterns for river scenes achieve a lush, decorative quality reflecting the girl’s oneness with nature, while paler tones and bland furnishings create a sterile interior space, mirroring her inability to replicate nature. Close-ups of the girl’s face convey joy, excitement, wonder, dismay, and eventual acceptance. Her fish-shaped barrette and fish-patterned dress and bathing suit cleverly echo the very visible red fish. She is depicted with light ocher skin and purple hair.
Moving and evocative visual storytelling. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6875-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Parent-child love and affection, appealingly presented, with the added attraction of the seasonal content and lack of gender...
A polar-bear parent speaks poetically of love for a child.
A genderless adult and cub travel through the landscapes of an arctic year. Each of the softly rendered double-page paintings has a very different feel and color palette as the pair go through the seasons, walking through wintry ice and snow and green summer meadows, cavorting in the blue ocean, watching whales, and playing beside musk oxen. The rhymes of the four-line stanzas are not forced, as is the case too often in picture books of this type: “When cold, winter winds / blow the leaves far and wide, / You’ll cross the great icebergs / with me by your side.” On a dark, snowy night, the loving parent says: “But for now, cuddle close / while the stars softly shine. // I’ll always be yours, / and you’ll always be mine.” As the last illustration shows the pair curled up for sleep, young listeners will be lulled to sweet dreams by the calm tenor of the pictures and the words. While far from original, this timeless theme is always in demand, and the combination of delightful illustrations and poetry that scans well make this a good choice for early-childhood classrooms, public libraries, and one-on-one home read-alouds.
Parent-child love and affection, appealingly presented, with the added attraction of the seasonal content and lack of gender restrictions. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68010-070-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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