This quirky picture book is sweet but overlong.
If someone wrote a book about you, what would happen in it?
Who would you be? What would you do? This rhyming, cheerily illustrated picture book offers some possible answers. You might, for example, travel on a broomstick or find yourself a magic wand. You might travel to outer space or the Arctic, or you may stay closer to home. You might do incredible, important things like rescuing royalty or giving huge speeches or tearing down walls. You might heal the world by curing polar bears of their blues or simply apologizing for something you did wrong. You might go on wild adventures that give you the opportunity to interact with walruses, dinosaurs, emus, yaks, and tea-sipping frogs. When you use your imagination and tell your own stories, there are endless possibilities for magic, mayhem, fun, and learning. The layered, geometric illustrations include cartoon characters with various skin tones inhabiting colorful, detailed worlds that burst with life and movement. The text has a call-and-response feel that lends itself to reading out loud. Some of the pages reference possible choices that could occur both in dreams and in real life, such as doing small kindnesses or choosing your own path. At times, however, the words feel repetitive, with, perhaps, scenarios added to fill out the page count rather than because they were strictly necessary. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at 56.3% of actual size.)
This quirky picture book is sweet but overlong. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304150-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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