This free-verse cooking poem is more than a simple recipe for bean soup. Argueta’s lyrical Spanish translated into its counterpart English is filled with visual and aromatic imagery that turns soup-making into art. Describing ingredients such as water “whose caresses give us life,” garlic cloves each “in a little white dress” and salt sprinkled “as though it were rain blossoming from your hand,” Argueta’s metaphorical instructions produce bean-filled water that doesn’t just boil, but sings as it turns brown, “the color of mother Earth,” making the house smell “like the earth after the first winter rains.” Yockteng’s parallel earthy-toned paintings oppose each new instructive page, illustrating an animated boy performing each step of the recipe until the inviting scent and warmth of the kitchen beckons a loving family to the table. Starred cues appropriately indicate adult help where needed in this eloquent rendering of a nutritious and delicious meal. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-88899-881-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This heavily earnest celebration of multi-ethnicity combines full-bleed paintings of smiling children, viewed through a golden haze dancing, playing, planting seedlings, and the like, with a hyperbolic, disconnected text—``Dark as leopard spots, light as sand,/Children buzz with laughter that kisses our land...''— printed in wavy lines. Literal-minded readers may have trouble with the author's premise, that ``Children come in all the colors of the earth and sky and sea'' (green? blue?), and most of the children here, though of diverse and mixed racial ancestry, wear shorts and T-shirts and seem to be about the same age. Hamanaka has chosen a worthy theme, but she develops it without the humor or imagination that animates her Screen of Frogs (1993). (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-11131-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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This companion to Alexander and Sweet’s How To Read a Book (2019) offers children a path from swirling inspiration to poetry.
Alexander and Nikaido’s own poem, blossoming with metaphor, its similes multiplying like mushrooms, locates its advice in nature. “Begin / with a question, / like an acorn / waiting for spring.” Their free verse, at once economical and luminous, beautifully charts the process from thought to expression, inviting children to imagine boundlessly. Accentuating the work of poem-making, the authors offer advice on handling those teeming words: “Invite them / into your paper boat / and row row row / across the wild white expanse.” Sweet’s gouache-and-watercolor illustrations depict diverse, dynamically active people within a colorful universe of collaged cut shapes, word-strewn vintage papers, pebbles, and hand-lettered text. Endlessly inventive, she affixes a drawing to loose-leaf paper, making its straight lines leap up and over three rowboats. Opposite, a group of kids collect letter shapes in a vessel folded from an old book page. Echoing the sentiment of an introductory quote from poet Nikki Giovanni (“We are all either wheels or connectors. Whichever we are, we must find truth and balance, which is a bicycle”), the double spreads are peppered with circles, curves, and loops. Alexander and Nikaido end with a final, heartfelt call to poets-in-training: “Now, show us what you’ve found.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Marvelously crafted to inspire blooming writers. (notes from Alexander and Sweet) (Picture book/poetry. 5-8)Pub Date: April 4, 2023
ISBN: 9780063060906
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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