A great choice to highlight diverse friendships and believing in yourself—with a fun touch of dinosaurs.
The girl with impossible curls and dinosaurs that hide in them returns in this sequel from team Rose-Vallee and Matsick (Dinosaurs Living in MY HAIR!, 2015) about finding similarities among friends—and being brave when bullies are mean.
Sabrina, now in first grade, still has those uncontrollable curls; three dinosaurs have taken up residence near her bow. Classmates mock the curls of blonde Sabrina and four of her friends: Faye, Gage, Espuardo, and Chanelle. When dinosaurs fall out of Sabrina’s hair at recess, she’s worried her friends will judge, but it turns out they all have dinos of their own. Matsick’s watercolor illustrations of this group of friends are a delightful celebration of diversity. The hair in the group includes red, brown, and black, and the skin tones vary just as much; the children are as distinct as their dinosaurs, and the riot of colors is as vibrant as the kids’ imaginations. When the dinos save Sabrina from a mean bully’s pranks, she and her friends learn a powerful lesson about how to deal with bullies: “You might think that the dinosaurs / were key to our success, / but friends and self-acceptance are / the answer I profess.” Rose-Vallee’s rhyming text flows in perfect rhythm and rhyme, and her vocabulary choices are unique enough to offer a comfortable challenge for Sabrina’s fellow first-grade readers.
A great choice to highlight diverse friendships and believing in yourself—with a fun touch of dinosaurs.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9861922-1-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Rosevallee Creations LLC
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A quirky, fun story that will appeal to young audiences looking for a little bit of scare, with a premise so good it...
A tiger can’t believe it’s being upstaged in this picture-book riff on William Blake’s famous poem.
A group of zoologically diverse animals huddle around a fire, listening to a porcupine read from a chilling poem: “Bunnies, bunnies, burning bright, / in the forests of the night—.” An incredulous tiger interrupts, saying that the poem is actually about it. But a squirrel matter-of-factly states that “Here, it’s ‘bunnies, bunnies.’ ” The tiger still doesn’t understand why the animals would be so afraid of bunnies but not afraid of tigers and tries to explain why it, an apex predator, is far more threatening. The smaller animals remain unimpressed, calmly telling the tiger that “In this forest, we fear the bunny” and that it should “Hide now, before it’s too late.” An amusing and well-done premise slightly disappoints at the climax, with the tiger streaking away in terror before a horde of headlamp-wearing bunnies, but eager readers never learn what, exactly, the bunnies would do if they caught up. But at the end, a group of tigers joins the other animals in their awestruck reading of the adapted Blake poem, included in full at the end. Cute, fuzzy illustrations contrast nicely with the dark tone and forest background.
A quirky, fun story that will appeal to young audiences looking for a little bit of scare, with a premise so good it overcomes a weak conclusion. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7800-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
New readers will be eager to follow such unconventional instructions, and experienced readers will recognize every single...
A linguistic and visual feast awaits in Alexander and Sweet’s debut collaboration.
If the mechanics of deciphering words on a page is a well-covered topic, the orchestration of finding magic between pages is an art emphasized but unexplained…until now. First things are first: “find a tree—a black tupelo or dawn redwood will do—and plant yourself.” Once settled, take the book in hand and “dig your thumb at the bottom of each juicy section and pop the words out…[then] // Squeeze every morsel of each plump line until the last drop of magic / drips from the infinite sky.” Reading, captured here in both content and form, is hailed as the unassailably individual, creative act it is. The prosody and rhythm and multimodal sensuousness of Alexander’s poetic text is made playfully material in Sweet’s mixed-media collage-and-watercolor illustrations. Not only does the book explain how to read, but it also demonstrates the elegant and emotive chaos awaiting readers in an intricate partnership of text and image. Despite the engaging physicality of gatefolds and almost three-dimensional spreads, readers with lower contrast sensitivity or readers less experienced at differentiating shapes and letters may initially find some of the more complex collage spreads difficult to parse. Children depicted are typically kraft-paper brown.
New readers will be eager to follow such unconventional instructions, and experienced readers will recognize every single step . (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-230781-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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