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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on...
Continuing from their acclaimed Those Shoes (2007), Boelts and Jones entwine conversations on money, motives, and morality.
This second collaboration between author and illustrator is set within an urban multicultural streetscape, where brown-skinned protagonist Ruben wishes for a bike like his friend Sergio’s. He wishes, but Ruben knows too well the pressure his family feels to prioritize the essentials. While Sergio buys a pack of football cards from Sonny’s Grocery, Ruben must buy the bread his mom wants. A familiar lady drops what Ruben believes to be a $1 bill, but picking it up, to his shock, he discovers $100! Is this Ruben’s chance to get himself the bike of his dreams? In a fateful twist, Ruben loses track of the C-note and is sent into a panic. After finally finding it nestled deep in a backpack pocket, he comes to a sense of moral clarity: “I remember how it was for me when that money that was hers—then mine—was gone.” When he returns the bill to her, the lady offers Ruben her blessing, leaving him with double-dipped emotions, “happy and mixed up, full and empty.” Readers will be pleased that there’s no reward for Ruben’s choice of integrity beyond the priceless love and warmth of a family’s care and pride.
Embedded in this heartwarming story of doing the right thing is a deft examination of the pressures of income inequality on children. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6649-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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