A lovely way for children to imagine what happens to a wish.
Who hasn’t wondered where a wish goes?
In this airy musing, a wish floats on the wind like a maple seed. The wish takes a breathtaking journey, sailing over water, drifting through canyons, gliding down streets and along roofs, weaving among raindrops. Then it tumbles to the ground and waits, very still. At just the right time, “it sends down a silent root / and pushes up a hopeful shoot.” The shoot, in turn, grows, reaches up and out until it “bravely / blooms.” The simple, gentle narrative concludes as it began: “A wish is a seed carried on the wind.” But how that wish has burgeoned! By the end, it’s thrived and become a symbol flush with hope and possibilities to be marveled at in wide-eyed wonder by a young black child and dad—the objects of the wish? Readers should appreciate not only the fanciful notion of what happens to a wish, but also the whimsical typesetting: Some words and phrases are set upside down, sideways, or curved, the text playfully emulating the wish’s acrobatics. The evocative, slightly surreal illustrations work beautifully with the lyrical story. Mostly dark-blue or dark-green backgrounds throw details of the city setting and natural world into relief. One delightful spread shows the “wish tree” in its bright red-orange blooming splendor.
A lovely way for children to imagine what happens to a wish. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-56846-338-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Creative Editions/Creative Company
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not even the relatively lengthy afterword can fill all the holes in this superficial, less-than-compelling profile.
A strangely uninformative look at a python’s life and life cycle.
A python (identified in the closing note as an Australian diamond python) slithers from shelter to bask in the sun, shed her skin and nab a rat (after missing a bird). Suddenly eggs appear, as if from nowhere. The python conscientiously incubates them until they begin to hatch, then abruptly departs to let her offspring “start their own lives of smelling, resting, watching…and waiting.” The earnest narrative is accompanied on each spread by additional details in an insufficiently different typeface. Cheng slides past any direct mention of death (“When the rat can no longer breathe, dinner is ready”), drops in a vague reference to unidentified egg “predators” and presents at best a sketchy overview of snake anatomy. Readers wondering how pythons get around, how those eggs came to be fertilized or laid, and like questions will find no answers here—either in the text or in Jackson’s muddy, indistinct painted illustrations.
Not even the relatively lengthy afterword can fill all the holes in this superficial, less-than-compelling profile. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6396-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
Nevertheless, next to such artful treatments as The Carrot Seed and And Then It’s Spring, by Julie Fogliano and illustrated...
A verbal and visual tone poem involving a seed, a wish and time.
A text afflicted with grammatical ambiguity (“If you hold a seed / And make a wish, / And plant it in the ground…”) and an unlikely claim that “When autumn comes again, / [The tree] will lean into the wind” chronicles the growth of a tree. With it, the book follows the boy who plants it over years and seasons until he sits, an adult, on one of its branches to show another seed in turn to a child. The seeds depicted are just generic blobs, and despite recognizable birds and butterflies in MacKay’s paper-collage scenes, her pervasive use of extremely soft focus backgrounds and slow shifts of hue set aside specific depictions of natural detail in favor of a dreamy, abstract evocation of time’s passage. Likewise, except for some of the animals, her figures look down, away or off to the side, which will have the effect of distancing viewers—younger ones, at least. MacKay’s debut could have used better writing, but artistically, she does show unusual sensitivity to effects of color and light.
Nevertheless, next to such artful treatments as The Carrot Seed and And Then It’s Spring, by Julie Fogliano and illustrated by Erin E. Stead (2012), it pretty much defines “additional purchase.” (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7624-4721-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Running Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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