Despite the mildly unusual twist, it treads familiar territory and not particularly well.
As if starting school weren’t worry enough, new students need to fret about classmates who bring their oversized reptilian pets along.
“The rules of the playground are hard for a beast. / He’ll break the first one as soon as released.” This proves to be the case. A yellow one bumps into the principal in his haste to get outside. A green one’s forelegs are too short for the monkey bars, so she pitches a fit until she realizes she can use her tail instead…and bends the whole structure. A long, thin, blue dragon pushes the merry-go-round. “He’ll start out slow but soon he will run. / Then the ride becomes more scary than fun.” (The illustration for this is particularly amusing.) A final, purple dragon is very well-behaved, but excitement brings out the flames. Still, the child who brought the yellow one makes a case that the dragon is smart and can learn and listen, and the principal, a woman of color, says that he’s welcome, a message that few, if any, books in this vein echo. Gassman’s rhythms and rhymes are sometimes rough and don’t always scan well. Many of the figures have white rather than black outlines, giving them the appearance of cutouts laid on top of the background in the brightly colored, Saturday morning–cartoonish illustrations. The racially diverse students and teachers include a child with glasses, one with an arm in a sling, and one in a wheelchair.
Despite the mildly unusual twist, it treads familiar territory and not particularly well. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68436-035-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted...
Reinvention is the name of the game for two blobs of clay.
A blue-eyed gray blob and a brown-eyed brown blob sit side by side, unsure as to what’s going to happen next. The gray anticipates an adventure, while the brown appears apprehensive. A pair of hands descends, and soon, amid a flurry of squishing and prodding and poking and sculpting, a handsome gray wolf and a stately brown owl emerge. The hands disappear, leaving the friends to their own devices. The owl is pleased, but the wolf convinces it that the best is yet to come. An ear pulled here and an extra eye placed there, and before you can shake a carving stick, a spurt of frenetic self-exploration—expressed as a tangled black scribble—reveals a succession of smug hybrid beasts. After all, the opportunity to become a “pig-e-phant” doesn’t come around every day. But the sound of approaching footsteps panics the pair of Picassos. How are they going to “fix [them]selves” on time? Soon a hippopotamus and peacock are staring bug-eyed at a returning pair of astonished hands. The creative naiveté of the “clay mates” is perfectly captured by Petty’s feisty, spot-on dialogue: “This was your idea…and it was a BAD one.” Eldridge’s endearing sculpted images are photographed against the stark white background of an artist’s work table to great effect.
The dynamic interaction between the characters invites readers to take risks, push boundaries, and have a little unscripted fun of their own . (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-30311-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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