A fun concept well executed, this picture book feels like a joyride.
The secret emotions of automobiles are revealed in a rhyming picture book about their many moods.
While it may be no revelation to any young reader who’s seen Disney's Cars movies, motor vehicles have feelings too. They can be sad, joyous, angry, or even envious. In this book that uses different colors to symbolize sundry emotions, various automobiles talk to the reader in singsong-y verses expressing how they’re feeling. A photo of a different vintage car is shown on each recto page. A 1956 A.C. Cobra, for instance, is sad, “with tears on its cheek,” after losing its favorite parking spot (the car’s chrome front bumpers look like tears); a 1938 Delage Coupe is happy since its gas tank is full; and so on. An answer “key” (a pun that the author fully intends) at the end of the book reveals the car models and manufacture years, with superimposed yellow lines showing how each car’s front trimmings resemble a different facial expression. The concept is clever, and the cars look great, though it’s unlikely that young readers will be familiar with the stylings of mid-20th-century Bugattis and Jaguars unless they’re also already subscribers to Hemmings Motor News. The backmatter stresses the importance of facial emotion recognition in child development and explains how pareidolia (our tendency to see faces in everyday objects) can foster children’s emotional literacy. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A fun concept well executed, this picture book feels like a joyride. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4338-3699-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Magination/American Psychological Association
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
A hilarious “toot salute” to the gas we pass.
Continuing her valiant efforts to embrace the world’s less lovable contents from spiders and math to garbage and germs, Barton offers a new addition to her series.
Though the author/illustrator opens with a claim that farts have existed as long as humans—a howler she herself contradicts when she gets to introducing the far more ancient and “famously flatulent” termite—and even doubles down later with a similarly specious declaration about digestive system microbes, her overall assertion that passing gas is hilarious as well as natural and healthy is inarguable. After all, she notes, the oldest joke on record, going back nearly 4,000 years, is fart-related (she doesn’t repeat it, alas). The illustrations reinforce both themes; between endpapers featuring visual representations of nearly two dozen distinctive poots, each labeled with a synonym for the act, a serious young lecturer provides a simple discourse on the causes and contents of farts as well as about animals that also produce them or, like sloths and birds, don’t. The narrator is frequently derailed by a pesky brother’s wisecracks and billowing clouds of noxiously hued funk. In the end, though, both tan-skinned children wind up “feeling the fart love,” and perhaps readers will, too. Other human figures in the art are racially diverse, and one uses a wheelchair.
A hilarious “toot salute” to the gas we pass. (fascinating facts on flatulence, further resources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593693773
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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