Beatles lovers should stick to sharing just the tune and skip this.
Yet another famous song gets the picture-book treatment, and yet another song’s lyrics are revealed to be less than the sum of the tune’s parts.
The Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” was born in the Summer of Love, and its chorus reflects that. The verses, though….As Barry Miles quotes Paul McCartney in his book Many Years from Now, “The chorus…is simple, but the verse is quite complex; in fact, I never understood it….” Young readers are no more likely to get it than McCartney, and even adults reading, “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done,” are likely to say, “Duh.” It’s best just to go with it and stick around for the chorus. Rosenthal’s artwork begins with a bear in a den made of rocks listening to some birds in a nest: “Love, love, love.” Two more successive spreads show the bear inspecting the birds’ nest up close and then, walking on two hind legs, starting a parade through the forest to the outskirts of a town and then right through it, forest animals and a pair of children, one brown-skinned with short black hair and the other a pale-skinned blonde, joining behind, with the whole parade leaving blooming flowers in its wake. Along the way, diverse people stop and watch. While bright and colorful, the pictures don’t elucidate the verses’ meaning any better than the text, though love comes through loud and clear. Final art not seen.
Beatles lovers should stick to sharing just the tune and skip this. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Jan. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2981-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little Simon/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Sure to have little ones giggling.
Jacques is a hedgehog with a big secret: “I wear real, bona fide underwear.”
Our narrator received a mysterious package one day; an illustration shows a pair of underwear tied to a balloon with a note “from the Universe” floating down into Jacques’ burrow. Hedgehogs don’t wear underwear, however. Will Jacques be shunned? Jacques worries but comes to a decision: “I have to wear them. When I do I feel special.” Determined, Jacques, who’s been invited to a party, makes a dramatic entrance, with undies in hand. Jacques’ declaration (“I WEAR UNDERWEAR”) is met with remarks of dismay, before another hedgehog opens up about similar fears and shows off a pair of cowboy boots. More hedgehogs introduce themselves with their own confessions. The story ends with Jacques unveiling a painting of the underwear in a gallery filled with hedgehogs wearing all sorts of attire. Though the book is simple in plot, characters, and setting, it wins in its balance of bathroom humor, dramatic storytelling, and celebrations of individual expression. French words are peppered throughout, adding to the fun without detracting from the story for those unfamiliar with the language. The cartoonish illustrations brim with fun; Valdez relies heavily on geometric shapes (triangle noses for the hedgehogs; huge circles for their eyes). Details such as speech bubbles and recurring turtle and snake characters contribute to the outlandish humor.
Sure to have little ones giggling. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781250814388
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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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
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