Conscience wins out, in the end, as does the willingness to forgive that waging peace requires.
A neighbor’s soaring, swooping fish kite touches off a sharp conflict between desire and conscience in a young girl.
To a spare narrative that requires reading between the lines to catch the emotional nuances, Bentley pairs two pale-skinned children with windblown hair amid dizzyingly vertiginous hills and perspectives that evoke a kite’s sudden, darting dance across the sky. Catching sight of the yellow kite one day, black-haired Daisy follows its string to a brown-haired boy named William, who teaches her how to make it dive and zoom. But rather than give it back afterward, Daisy runs home and hides it in her room. Days pass, though, before she can bring herself to fly it…and when at last she does, she sees William watching. After a sleepless night she leaves it at his gate with an apology. Later she sees the kite in the sky again, and here comes William—with a box of materials to make another kite. “Then they run to the hill,” Holmes concludes. “Blue sky, yellow kite, red kite dancing.” Bentley’s full-bleed paintings, created with pencil and watercolor and then composed in Photoshop, revel in the freedom of the out-of-doors.
Conscience wins out, in the end, as does the willingness to forgive that waging peace requires. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: May 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4413-2482-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Peter Pauper Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A close encounter of the best kind.
Left behind when the space bus departs, a child discovers that the moon isn’t as lifeless as it looks.
While the rest of the space-suited class follows the teacher like ducklings, one laggard carrying crayons and a sketchbook sits down to draw our home planet floating overhead, falls asleep, and wakes to see the bus zooming off. The bright yellow bus, the gaggle of playful field-trippers, and even the dull gray boulders strewn over the equally dull gray lunar surface have a rounded solidity suggestive of Plasticine models in Hare’s wordless but cinematic scenes…as do the rubbery, one-eyed, dull gray creatures (think: those stress-busting dolls with ears that pop out when squeezed) that emerge from the regolith. The mutual shock lasts but a moment before the lunarians eagerly grab the proffered crayons to brighten the bland gray setting with silly designs. The creatures dive into the dust when the bus swoops back down but pop up to exchange goodbye waves with the errant child, who turns out to be an olive-skinned kid with a mop of brown hair last seen drawing one of their new friends with the one crayon—gray, of course—left in the box. Body language is expressive enough in this debut outing to make a verbal narrative superfluous.
A close encounter of the best kind. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
The story feels a bit contrived, but Ada will be a welcome addition to the small circle of science-loving girls in the...
Using science and technology, third-grader Ada Lace kicks off her new series by solving a mystery even with her leg in a cast.
Temporarily housebound after a badly executed bungee jump, Ada uses binoculars to document the ecosystem of her new neighborhood in San Francisco. She records her observations in a field journal, a project that intrigues new friend Nina, who lives nearby. When they see that Ms. Reed’s dog, Marguerite, is missing, they leap to the conclusion that it has been stolen. Nina does the legwork and Ada provides the technology for their search for the dognapper. Story-crafting takes a back seat to scene-setting in this series kickoff that introduces the major players. As part of the series formula, science topics and gadgetry are integrated into the stories and further explained in a “Behind the Science” afterword. This installment incorporates drones, a wireless camera, gecko gloves, and the Turing test as well as the concept of an ecosystem. There are no ethnic indicators in the text, but the illustrations reveal that Ada, her family, and bratty neighbor Milton are white; Nina appears to be Southeast Asian; and Mr. Peebles, an inventor who lives nearby, is black.
The story feels a bit contrived, but Ada will be a welcome addition to the small circle of science-loving girls in the chapter-book world. (Fiction. 7-9)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8599-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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