Bogart presents a way for young children to explore the concepts of big and small in a way few picture books address. Eschewing the usual mother-and-baby-animal or household-items examples, she starts with the universe and gets progressively smaller—sun to earth, mountain, tree, man, child, kitten, mouse, flea...“What is smaller than a flea? / A world of things / too small to see.” What makes this offering so different is that each is big and small at the same time: “Big Earth, / Small mountain.” A turn of the page reveals, “Big mountain, / Small tree.” For her picture-book debut, Newland chooses watercolors in muted earth tones that lend the illustrations a charming retro feel. Her scenery is stunning, and the smaller the comparisons, the more detailed the pictures get. Both text and illustrations have a modest sense of the sublime in their subject, one that comes across clearly. A necessary purchase that surpasses the ordinary fare. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: April 14, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-88776-891-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This charming, colorful counting tale of ten little fish runs full-circle. Although the light verse opens and closes with ten fish swimming in a line, page-by-page the line grows shorter as the number of fish diminishes one-by-one. One fish dives down, one gets lost, one hides, and another takes a nap until a single fish remains. Then along comes another fish to form a couple and suddenly a new family of little fish emerges to begin all over. Slick, digitally-created images of brilliant marine flora and fauna give an illusion of underwater depth and silence enhancing the verse’s numerical and theatrical progression. The holistic story bubbles with life’s endless cycle. (Picture book. 3-5)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63569-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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