Relentlessly facile—but if action ever begins with goal visualization, at least a place to start.
Following Touch the Earth (2017), young readers are invited to fly on further missions of mercy to our beleaguered planet and its residents.
A feather converts with a tap on the image of a button in the right-hand corner of the spread and a page turn to a White Feather Flier (named after Lennon’s charitable White Feather Foundation) that transports, in Coh’s misty, painted pictures, a thoroughly diverse quartet of children to a variety of troubled places. They visit in succession a town whose residents lack medical services, a bleached coral reef, a drab urban neighborhood, and a clear-cut rainforest. At every stop, further taps on a button image bring instant relief: The Flier becomes a mobile hospital; “zooks” (zooxanthellae, depicted as tiny green cells with smiley faces) return to give the reef color and life; the city gets a new green space; and the devastated forest’s flora and fauna are restored to lush life. Following vague exhortations to “work together” and to “make healing an adventure,” Lennon concludes with six solo-credited stanzas of similarly airy sentiment: “Come together, see it through, / End disease and hunger too. / Help the children, one and all. / Winter, Summer, Spring, and Fall.” Thoughtfully, the humans in need are depicted as diverse and not uniformly brown; slightly less thoughtfully, one of the two brown-skinned children among the helpers is depicted with knotted hair that recalls the pickaninny stereotype.
Relentlessly facile—but if action ever begins with goal visualization, at least a place to start. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2853-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the...
Rhymed couplets convey the story of a girl who likes to build things but is shy about it. Neither the poetry nor Rosie’s projects always work well.
Rosie picks up trash and oddments where she finds them, stashing them in her attic room to work on at night. Once, she made a hat for her favorite zookeeper uncle to keep pythons away, and he laughed so hard that she never made anything publicly again. But when her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit and reminds Rosie of her own past building airplanes, she expresses her regret that she still has not had the chance to fly. Great-great-aunt Rose is visibly modeled on Rosie the Riveter, the iconic, red-bandanna–wearing poster woman from World War II. Rosie decides to build a flying machine and does so (it’s a heli-o-cheese-copter), but it fails. She’s just about to swear off making stuff forever when Aunt Rose congratulates her on her failure; now she can go on to try again. Rosie wears her hair swooped over one eye (just like great-great-aunt Rose), and other figures have exaggerated hairdos, tiny feet and elongated or greatly rounded bodies. The detritus of Rosie’s collections is fascinating, from broken dolls and stuffed animals to nails, tools, pencils, old lamps and possibly an erector set. And cheddar-cheese spray.
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the right place. (historical note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0845-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rock on, Rocket! (Early reader. 5-7)
Into the woods….
Hills’ canine picture-book protagonist, Rocket, learned how to read in his first book and now stars in an early reader designed for kids learning to read, too. The story opens when Rocket is charmed by a pink butterfly that lands on his nose, and he follows it from spread to spread until it “flies into the forest.” In contrast with prior spreads that featured ample white, open space, the ensuing illustrations of the forest are dark and saturated. A full-bleed double-page spread shows Rocket small and low at the bottom of the verso with the forest before him: “The forest is very dark. The trees are very tall. Rocket does not want to go into the forest.” After some hemming and hawing, Rocket’s desire to find the butterfly overpowers his fear of the forest, and he walks among the tall trees, looking at pine cones, ferns, and, finally, the butterfly. Necessary redundancy between art and text befits the early-reader form and allows children to find cues in the art to support decoding of the controlled text, but Hills’ deep experience as a picture-book artist enriches his attention to framing, pacing, and layout. The result is an exemplary early reader in words and images, with a happy ending, to boot.
Rock on, Rocket! (Early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: July 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-7347-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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