A simple, wholesome little adventure for young readers.
In Ballow’s debut picture book, a young girl loses her first tooth but doesn’t receive anything from the Tooth Fairy.
Sam, who has light brown skin and curly brown hair, loses her first tooth while chewing on crunchy cereal. She leaves it under her pillow, but in the morning is distraught to find the tooth gone and nothing left in exchange. Sam writes to the Tooth Fairy to ask for an explanation. The Tooth Fairy comes personally to investigate, riding her magical bird Gordy. Sam, her mother, and the Tooth Fairy search the house. Gordy pecks around outside, and in doing so gives himself away—he was the one who took the tooth and the gift, burying them as a joke. Realizing that this wasn’t funny, he apologies to Sam, who forgives him. Ballow employs straightforward prose, presented primarily against white backdrops kept separate from the illustrations. The story’s main plot point serves both as a lesson in coping with disappointment and as the basis for parent/child discussions about what sort of jokes are amusing versus those that are cruel (“Next time, let’s play a game we all think is funny”). Throughout, Sheikh brightens the proceedings with lush, cloudy, pastel-colored digital illustrations that capture Sam’s happy home environment. Though the characters’ sizes and skin tones are not always consistent, the images will hold younger kids’ interest as the narrative unfolds.
A simple, wholesome little adventure for young readers.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9798218123963
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Tooth Fairy Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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