An enjoyable, instructive story with humor, heart and a pair of adorable mice.
Ordinal numbers are featured in this delightful entry in the Mouse Math series starring brother-and-sister team Albert and Wanda.
With his sunny, polka-dot apron on, Albert is excited to make muffins. But then Wanda informs him that they are out of flour. Dismayed, Albert points to the recipe list. “But flour is the first ingredient!...I can’t make muffins without flour.” Wanda suggests that Albert do what their mother does when she is missing an ingredient: Ask the neighbors. And so starts Albert’s enthusiastic quest for the 10 ingredients—all of which he ends up borrowing from friends, neighbors or relatives who are happy to share. At the bottom of the page, readers can see a picture of each ingredient, with its ordinal number, as Albert acquires them. He makes a daring dash from his mouse hole for the last thing—milk—snatching a mouse-sized bottleful from the cat’s bowl. After the muffins are baked, Wanda leads Albert by the paw with their basket of hot muffins as they deliver one to each contributor (even the cat), another opportunity for May to reiterate the ordinals. The colorful drawings are delightfully expressive, each mouse endowed with a defined and individualized personality. Exercises appended reinforce the lesson.
An enjoyable, instructive story with humor, heart and a pair of adorable mice. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57565-632-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kane Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A mind-stretching outlook that may help youngsters with change—and will certainly cause them to think.
A cyclical take on life.
Endings can sometimes feel sad or heavy in their finality. But Bender reverses this perspective. In fact, the story starts, as a tiny caterpillar tells readers, with “THE END.” A young tot on a bed closing a book looks puzzled. Bender acknowledges the absurdity. “But wait—how can a book possibly start with the end? That’s ridiculous.” It’s not, once you change your frame of reference. Continuing in a conversational tone, Bender gives examples. Some are personal and immediate: “The end of a disagreement with someone … / is just the beginning of making up.” Others are more abstract: “When you count, the end of one number is just the beginning of the next number… / and so on and so on and so on, all the way to infinity, which, by the way, NEVER ends!” Two friends or perhaps siblings (one with brown skin and brown hair in two Afro puffs, the other with pale skin and straight, black hair) act out the scenarios, which are strung together over the course of a day from one morning to the next. Mayo’s illustrations also dance between concrete and abstract, illustrating disagreement with one kid scowling, sitting back to the other, who looks distressed, next to a ruined sand castle and infinity with an image of the two kids cycling along an enormous infinity sign. In a meta-infused closing, Bender concludes with “THE BEGINNING / (of discovering the next book).” A cleverly placed butterfly flits away. The hazy wash over muted tones gives a warm, cozy embrace to the message. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 48.2% of actual size.)
A mind-stretching outlook that may help youngsters with change—and will certainly cause them to think. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984896-93-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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