A comforting book about welcoming a new baby into the family.
A sensitive, introspective 5-year-old contemplates the consequences of having a new sibling in Hartzell’s pleasant debut, complemented by Cave’s sweet illustrations.
Young Noah is the most introspective of his siblings. His oldest brother, Jake, looks destined to become an engineer, and his other brother, Zach, is interested in drawing (and messing up Jake’s Lego towers). Noah observes his family in all their everyday rituals and pays close attention. He counts the chairs at the table and decides that, yes, there will be enough chairs when his new baby sibling arrives. He counts the number of places to sit in the living room: Yes, there will be enough, he thinks. He checks with his mother to confirm that there will be enough beds in their house and also counts the number of seats in the family minivan. When his parents go off to the hospital, however, Noah is still worried. What might be in short supply? Parents will likely guess the answer long before their children do: Noah’s worried that his mother might not have enough love for all her children. After giving birth, his mother explains, with a colorful, hand-drawn diagram of a heart, that with each new child, her love has only grown—there’s room for them all. It’s a message that will be particularly comforting for children expecting a new brother or sister. Although the text is dense for a kids’ book, Hartzell does a good job of giving Noah a simple, yet satisfying, answer to his question. The style of Cave’s illustrations is largely realistic, reflecting little of Noah’s anxiety, beyond his pensive expression. Some illustrations are set at strange angles (one looks down at the dining room table from above, for example), but overall, they’re child-friendly and match the story’s calm tone.
A comforting book about welcoming a new baby into the family.Pub Date: May 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1612251271
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Mirror Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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