A playful, useful outing.
It is raining so hard “it’s raining cats and frogs,” prompting choices about what to wear and do in the showery outdoors.
The dual English/Spanish text offers choices for the appropriate garb. Each question is asked. “What do you wear in the rain? / ¿Como te vistes para salir en la lluvia?” In the background, Long provides an array of choices—here a sweater, a dress, a raincoat and a jacket—allowing children to participate. Text and illustrations continue to interact for boots (cowboy, hiking, snow) and hats (woolen, cowboy, formal), showing a variety of selections next to the correct rain hat and boots. Comical illustrations present what look like construction-paper cutouts of a Caucasian boy and girl with round faces and thoughtful eyes. Cats and frogs playing in the puddles and surrounded by large raindrops beckon the two kids to follow suit. (Cat owners will get a wry chuckle out of this.) In a final scene, the boy reads a book, and the girl enjoys her tablet, their wet things scattered on the floor. The 36 vocabulary words on the back cover are useful for bilingual learners, but it’s too bad the alternate choices in the illustrations were not labeled for additional opportunities.
A playful, useful outing. (Early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60905-508-0
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Blue Apple
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Deft hommage, but hilarious even outside that context.
A droll seaside idyll, paying tribute as much to film comedies of the silent era as to the 1953 movie that inspired it.
In wordless, monochrome, mostly full-page illustrations, Merveille considerably reworks and abbreviates the plot of Les Vacances de M. Hulot but preserves both the pipe-smoking title character’s amiable imperturbability and the original’s nonstop succession of sandy distractions, minor disasters, and comical set pieces. A positive magnet for mishaps, hardly does Hulot stroll onto the beach before he’s doing classic battle with a folding lounge chair. There follows business with beach balls and children, a sea gull who steals his shoe, some funny improv with a seashell after he drops his pipe in the water, and other incidents. Finally, he falls asleep on the aforementioned chair and floats out to sea—fetching up in an English hamlet where he is last seen offering his by-now-tattered newspaper (its palest yellow the only spot of color in the art) to an astonished resident. Practically every picture is either a punch line or an obvious setup for one, but even young audiences unexposed as yet to the Chaplins and Keatons of yore will have no trouble either connecting the dots or appreciating the visual jokery.
Deft hommage, but hilarious even outside that context. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7358-4254-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
A joyful, upbeat tale that takes a positive perspective on an immigrant child’s first encounters.
A young refugee’s dream of riding a bicycle comes true at last when he arrives in America.
Though he’s too short to reach the pedals, Joseph loves to help Daau, an older resident of the Kenyan refugee camp at Kakuma, fix and maintain his bicycle. When Joseph and his mother leave the camp for America, though, he sees a bicycle that looks more his size. How can he persuade its owner, a classmate he dubs Whoosh for the way she zooms along, to lend it to him? His first try, a carefully drawn lion, she takes to be only a general offer of friendship. His second, a bandanna, she rejects because “I like my hair freeeeeee.” “Besides,” she goes on, “my bike broke. A tree hit it.” Third time’s the charm, as Joseph’s skill at bicycle repair earns him his longed-for ride—wobbly at first but soon steady and confident enough for no-hands. Cranking up the visual energy with quick, slashing brush strokes, Daley creates a generic urban setting for his dark-skinned young companions, tops Joseph’s new friend with a huge mop of flyaway hair that reflects her exuberant personality, and generally poses figures with widespread arms and welcoming smiles. In contrast to the traumas and cultural conflicts highlighted in many immigrant stories, such as Mary Hoffman and Karin Littlewood’s The Color of Home (2002) or Sarah Garland’s Azzi in Between (2013), Joseph’s adjustment from the outset seems relatively easy.
A joyful, upbeat tale that takes a positive perspective on an immigrant child’s first encounters. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55451-806-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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