Quibbles aside, this volume presents appetizing produce in an engaging array.
This photographic study of color introduces both widely known and unusual fruits and vegetables.
“Carrots are ORANGE. / They are also PURPLE. // Look what else can be PURPLE!” Against white backgrounds, crisp photographs are captioned with the produce’s common names. Purple Passion asparagus, Royal Burgundy beans and a Black Velvet apricot vie for readers’ eyes on a crowded double-page spread; layouts illustrating the colors blue and black feature fewer specimens and more white space. Unusual, well-chosen examples such as the Red Dacca banana, Louisiana Long Green eggplant, and the fabulous, many-tentacled Buddha’s Hand citron challenge readers’ assumptions about familiar fruits and veggies and expand their knowledge of rarer varieties. Bass’ groupings illustrate the fact that a color’s name approximates, rather than pinpoints, its essential attributes. Thus, the Adirondack Blue and Russian Blue potatoes could easily have joined the purple denizens rather than reside with the blues. And the Black Beauty eggplant and Jewel black raspberries are, arguably, highly pigmented versions of the color purple. Two kale varieties—Redbor and Lacinato—are captioned as “Redbar” and “Lacinto.” Clusters and groups are sometimes pluralized (“Jersey blueberries”), sometimes not (“Latham raspberry.”) There’s no attempt to depict scale—so a Calabrese broccoli is shown about half the size of a Bartlett pear.
Quibbles aside, this volume presents appetizing produce in an engaging array. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62672-002-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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