This is a useful depiction of a family’s physical move, but the strength is in the emotional journey that’s expressed with a...
Underwood explores the range of emotions a child moving to a new place may feel with a spare, rhyming text that creates a framework for Bean’s evocative illustrations.
An overbearing gray pall pulls readers into a young boy’s world of frustration, anger and hurt over moving. Pencil drawings with graphically stylized flat areas of color give detail to the four words of text per spread. “Bad mop / Bad blocks // Bad truck / Bad guy” (this last is the man loading the family’s belongings into the van). A car chugs through a changing landscape as the boy throws a tantrum, sleeps, brightens and hesitates. Bean effectively layers tones and imagery to depict the passage of time and bring forth the immediacy of a situation. As the boy enters his new house at night, there’s sensory overload, with light, shadows and the unfamiliar, creating an unsettling feel. But all ends well when a new acquaintance becomes a friend. Not every family or child may experience such negative emotions, but Underwood and Bean offer a potential tool for teaching empathy toward others who have made such a transition.
This is a useful depiction of a family’s physical move, but the strength is in the emotional journey that’s expressed with a raw honesty. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-92852-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet and unexpected addition to the waiting-for-baby shelf.
A big, yellow hound dog has small, wonderful dreams.
Emma’s dreams are doggily simple. Rendered in gray, they manifest above her contentedly slumbering form: “singing, dancing, rolling in grass, splashing in water, going for walks,” and eating. After she wakes and eats, she naps again, sprawled on her back, tummy distended, the very picture of canine bliss. Pages turn, with Cooper’s lyrical text focusing on Emma and her sensations: “The days went on, shifting and taking shape, and now there were times when her whole body felt strange, but there was no stopping the days.” A gently curving line of overlapping Emmas, rising, stretching, scratching, shifting, and resettling, underscores time’s march. Adult readers may be anxious at this point, fearing Emma’s impending death with the page turn—but no, it turns out Emma’s been literally full of wonders, and she gazes mildly at a puppy emerging from her own body. Then there they are, seven little Emmas, and they now embody her dreams. Cooper’s brushy, loose watercolors, outlined in swoops of ink, complement his Emma-focused text. She resides in a human home, but her owner appears only as tan-skinned hands extending from the margin to offer a bowl of food, caress her snout, or towel off a pup. In this way, Cooper invites readers into Emma’s interiority, allowing them to sit quietly and wonder with her.
A sweet and unexpected addition to the waiting-for-baby shelf. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884763
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Kids may choose differently at the pumpkin patch after reading this tale, though any deeper message may be lost on them.
A stemless pumpkin who isn’t chosen gets the best Halloween of all.
On the shelves outside a shop in a busy city, a shopkeeper makes a display of orange pumpkins and a single yellow gourd. They are all sizes and shapes and have lovely stems, save for one. Poor Stumpkin worries that, despite his good qualities, his stemlessness will prevent him from becoming a jack-o’-lantern like all the other pumpkins that go home with customers to decorate the windows across the street. On Halloween night, he alone is left (even the gourd went home with someone!). So the shopkeeper scoops him up. The spreads that follow are marvelous, wordless creations that will delight young readers: A black spread is followed by one with an orange-rimmed white triangle on the verso, then one with similar triangles on both pages. “Stumpkin wouldn’t be getting a window. And he wouldn’t be getting a new home. // He already had a home.” The final page shows Stumpkin as a jack-o’-lantern back on the shelves with the shopkeeper’s friendly black cat. Though undoubtedly feel-good, the book may leave readers wondering exactly what it’s saying about Stumpkin’s physical irregularity—is it some kind of disability metaphor? The city sights, people, and animals other than the cat are all black silhouettes, keeping the focus on Stumpkin.
Kids may choose differently at the pumpkin patch after reading this tale, though any deeper message may be lost on them. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1362-7
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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