Handsome but odd.
Meet a varied assortment of animals and learn a brief fact about each one.
There’s no question that the collage-style art here is striking. Boldly clipped animals pose in a sophisticated, modern-looking palette of desaturated primary colors. Illustrator Lundie collages with innovative papers, including weathered graph paper, cardboard, and old maps. Put together, they create a deep, satisfyingly textured feel, as when an old map becomes a cragged iceberg behind aqua waves and a languid-looking narwhal. Textually though, the book flags. One-line factoids such as “Leopard: I’ve got too many spots to count” are correct but bland. There’s no overt connection among the animals, which hail from many habitats, and their labelled sounds are random—why is the readily recognized toucan presented sleeping with a generic “zzzz” noise? The end falls utterly flat, with a confusing raccoon page that suddenly breaks the predictable pattern by introducing a rhetorical question and a peculiar final page featuring a reprisal of all the animals making their strangely chosen sounds: “Oh no! It’s all of us. What a terrible noise!” A companion book on colors features the same lively art but the same dull, nonsensical statements (“Pink is a pretty color”); at least the ending, which asks readers to identify all the colors, is less strained. Extra-thick cardboard pages will hold up to multiple reads.
Handsome but odd. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68152-570-9
Page Count: 10
Publisher: Amicus Ink
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
Ho-hum.
A riff on the familiar lullaby depicts various animal parents, and then a human father, soothing their sleepy little ones.
An opening spread includes the traditional first verse of the titular lullaby, but instead of depicting a human baby in a treetop cradle, the accompanying illustration shows a large tree as habitat to the animals that are highlighted on subsequent pages. First the perspective zooms in on a painterly illustration rendered in acrylics of a mother squirrel cuddling her baby with text reading “Rock-a-bye Squirrel, / high in the tree, / in Mommy’s arms, / cozy as can be.” In this spread and others the cadence doesn’t quite fit with the familiar tune, and repeated verses featuring different animals—all opening with the “Rock-a-bye” line—don’t give way to the resolution. No winds blow, no boughs break, and the repetitive forced rhythm of the verse could cause stumbles when attempting a read-aloud. The final image of a human father and baby, whose skin tone and hair texture suggest that they are perhaps of South Asian descent, provides pleasing visual resolution in a book with art that outshines text.
Ho-hum. (Picture book. 2-4)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3753-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
An excellent starter book for those looking to raise their children in a bilingual environment.
Niñas y niños learn their ABCs en español.
A is for ardilla (squirrel) and E is for erizo (hedgehog) in this pastel-colored board book. Each page features a different animal or object with a large, scratchily drawn uppercase letter in the top-left corner. (All the text appears to be hand-drawn and frequently displays irregular use of upper- and lowercase conventions.) The upper-right corner of the page spotlights the item’s Spanish and English names, with Spanish printed large on top and English in a smaller hand beneath. The illustrations are warm and sweet, presenting rounded, friendly figures colored with pastel hues. Even inanimate objects, such as the wafle (waffle) and the uvas (grapes), are given smiling faces and welcoming body language. There are separate entries for N for “niña/niño” (“girl/boy”) and Ñ for ñu (translated as “wildebeest” rather than “gnu”). It appears that X (xilófono) and Y (yak) are as troublesome for abecederaries in Spanish as in English. After the alphabet is finished, the backmatter provides the pronunciation of each letter for non–Spanish speakers and phonetic spelling for each creature along with the further introduction of the sounds ll, ch, and rr. The book is handsomely bound in faux hardcover style, boasting sturdy pages and smooth textures.
An excellent starter book for those looking to raise their children in a bilingual environment. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63322-283-0
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Walter Foster Jr.
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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