A tip of the hat to this delightful rendition of an old song, updated with memorable illustrations and a modern cast of...
This handsome rendition of the classic holiday song features a striking black cover with a folk-art–style floral border and the title in gold letters.
The visual story begins with a little girl dressed in an old-fashioned coat, receiving her first gift of a partridge in a potted pear tree. The smiling girl has light skin, pink cheeks, and a long, dark braid. On subsequent days, she receives the next gift on the left-hand page with the accumulated earlier gifts attractively arrayed on the right-hand page. The girl wears a different costume on each day, always with red bows on her braid. The double-page spreads effectively use white backgrounds and delicate floral borders augmented with tiny details appropriate to that day’s gifts. In the later gift days with human characters, each person within a group wears a different style of costume, and half the characters within each group are people of color. The final spread shows the little girl back home with her pear tree and partridge, with a light-skinned boy coming up the path, tipping his hat to his “true love.” Top-notch production values abound, including the intriguing cover, floral endpapers, thick paper, and an appealing, accessible overall design.
A tip of the hat to this delightful rendition of an old song, updated with memorable illustrations and a modern cast of characters. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-515-15763-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color
Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color . (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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