As colorful and raucous a collection of animals as ever was.
Readers learn the collective nouns for groups of animals in this picture book.
Rollicking rhymes introduce each group: “A parliament of owls was the first to arrive. / They perched in a tree up high. / A tower of giraffes glided in next, / their heads nearly touching the sky.” A light-skinned child with a cloud of red hair sits in a tree clutching a camera, but readers will only learn the reason for the gathering at the end. Animals from all habitats, from earth, sky, and water, all answer the call of this child: a prickle of porcupines, a barrel of monkeys, a cauldron of bats, a raft of otters, a rhumba of rattlesnakes, a shiver of sharks, and even a culture of bacteria are among them. And what to call this final huge group of diverse animals? The child has the perfect collective noun. The jaunty rhymes briefly lose their way, turning more toward a list and losing a bit of the bouncy rhythm. The cartoon animals ham it up, many times exhibiting anthropomorphic behavior (one crow surveys the reader murderously, some pandas walk on two legs, and the dazzle of zebras almost look like they are in a conga line). While unrealistic in the animal world, the ending could speak to an ideal for the human world to aspire to, especially in our current times. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
As colorful and raucous a collection of animals as ever was. (Informational picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: July 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-53411-144-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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