While not a child’s first counting book, it is a beautiful one and an inspiration to caregivers to help their children find...
Close-up photographs of architectural details give young readers a counting challenge.
Hill’s photographs take readers to the Art Deco District of Miami Beach, where they can count “1 yellow diamond,” “4 purple squares,” and “10 green rectangles,” among other shapes. She has to stretch to find 10 distinct shapes to fill her book, and readers may rightly feel that “3 gray wavy lines” and “9 pink zigzags” aren’t, strictly speaking, shapes. The book’s design is striking and thoughtful, each double-page spread enclosed in a black frame decorated with small examples of the shape and color highlighted; blue stars decorate the frame around the seven stars on the sign of a movie theater, for instance. Some artistic license has been taken, as with the white triangles that march in saw-tooth pattern around the photograph of “5 black triangles” that interrupt a square of white tiles. The photographs are always on recto, the numeral and brief text label printed on verso in the classically elegant, sans serif typeface associated with the Art Deco era against a plain field of the color featured. A concluding double-page spread presents eight photographs of new building details along with a challenge to readers to find further shapes and colors in them.
While not a child’s first counting book, it is a beautiful one and an inspiration to caregivers to help their children find shapes in their own neighborhoods. (Picture book. 2-6)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-59572-776-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Star Bright
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Innovative and thoroughly enjoyable.
You think you know shapes? Animals? Blend them together, and you might see them both a little differently!
What a mischievous twist on a concept book! With wordplay and a few groan-inducing puns, Neal creates connections among animals and shapes that are both unexpected and so seemingly obvious that readers might wonder why they didn’t see them all along. Of course, a “lazy turtle” meeting an oval would create the side-splitting combo of a “SLOW-VAL.” A dramatic page turn transforms a deeply saturated, clean-lined green oval by superimposing a head and turtle shell atop, with watery blue ripples completing the illusion. Minimal backgrounds and sketchy, impressionistic detailing keep the focus right on the zany animals. Beginning with simple shapes, the geometric forms become more complicated as the book advances, taking readers from a “soaring bird” that meets a triangle to become a “FLY-ANGLE” to a “sleepy lion” nonagon “YAWN-AGON.” Its companion text, Animal Colors, delves into color theory, this time creating entirely hybrid animals, such as the “GREEN WHION” with maned head and whale’s tail made from a “blue whale and a yellow lion.” It’s a compelling way to visualize color mixing, and like Animal Shapes, it’s got verve. Who doesn’t want to shout out that a yellow kangaroo/green moose blend is a “CHARTREUSE KANGAMOOSE”?
Innovative and thoroughly enjoyable. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4998-0534-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little Bee Books
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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