A droll tale with a simple message.
A little girl’s neglected belly button takes off on an adventure.
Grace, a cute, quickly sketched girl with tawny skin and a straight black pageboy, excels at getting dirty, but she is also pretty good at getting clean. Most of her body parts get attention in the bath, but not Belly Button. So one day, an unbearably filthy Belly Button decides that she has had enough. She detaches and races out the door! A round figure sporting a haircut like Grace’s and sticks for arms and legs, Belly Button charges into the great unknown. She finds a way to get herself clean but also runs into some unexpected excitement, getting both lost and dirty again. Unsurprisingly, she has a change of heart. Both Belly Button and Grace have a renewed appreciation for each other in the end, but the sly final page reminds readers of yet another unwashed body part….While the story is amusing and the illustrations appealing, the overall experience has little heft. As a reminder to children to wash all their body parts in the bath it works, but without a stronger element of friendship and adventure, it feels a bit thin. Charming depictions of Grace and Belly Button, with their rough outlines and dot eyes, are counterbalanced by a few confusing spreads without enough textual support. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 27% of actual size.)
A droll tale with a simple message. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20284-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color
Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color . (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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