Every educator knows the bathroom pass is an escape route for students. While neither condemning nor condoning that...
Dakos adds another collection to the poetry shelf, this one taking its inspiration from the school bathroom.
Every educator knows the bathroom pass is an escape route for students. While neither condemning nor condoning that behavior, Dakos’ poetry explores the many reasons kids might need that release: to get away from a bully, to chat with a friend, to cry about something happening at home, to celebrate a victory or agonize over a defeat and, of course, to use the toilet. Standouts among the silly poems include "Trapped!," about a boy stuck in a stall during recess and "The Bathroom Dance," which speaks for itself. The highlights of the serious offerings focus on telling secrets ("Blabbermouth") and divorce ("Crying in the Bathroom"). Many, while outwardly funny, challenge kids to delve a little deeper: “We were in the bathroom, / the bully and I. / He punched me, / I punched him back, / and that’s when he cried!” While there is some potty humor, Dakos keeps it from getting too disgusting, and several poems focus on good bathroom hygiene. Reminiscent of Quentin Blake’s drawings, Beech’s vignettes masterfully capture the essence of each poem, and children will be able to read his characters’ facial expressions and body language like an open book.Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8075-2675-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Effectively soporific, though less broadly diverse in culture than casting.
Intricate cut-paper borders and figures accompany a set of sleepy-time lyrics and traditional rhymes.
Aside from “All the Pretty Little Ponies,” which is identified as “possibly African American,” the selections are a mostly Eurocentric sampling. It’s a mix of familiar anonymous rhymes (“Oh, how lovely is the evening,” “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, / Bless this bed that I lie on”) and verses from known authors, including Jane Taylor’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” (first verse only), Robert Louis Stevenson’s “My Bed is a Boat,” and Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Seal’s Lullaby.” Melodramatic lullabies such as “Rockabye Baby” have been excluded in favor of more pacifistic poems, and in keeping with the cozy tone (though she does show one cat looming hungrily over a mouse hole), Dalton enfolds each entry in delicately detailed sprays of leaves or waves, graceful garlands of flowers, flights of butterflies, and tidy arrangements of natural or domestic items, all set against black or dark backgrounds that intensify the soft colors. A parade of young people—clad in nightclothes and diverse of facial features, hair color and texture, and skin hue—follow a childlike, white angel on the endpapers and pose drowsily throughout.
Effectively soporific, though less broadly diverse in culture than casting. (Picture book/poetry. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4521-1673-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Nourishing fare for young stargazers who really, truly do “wonder what you are.” (Informational picture book. 6-9)
From an astrophysicist, the straight dope on stars and starry phenomena.
Kregenow responds to the popular nursery rhyme in the same metrical vein but with analytical precision: “Opaque ball of hot dense gas, / million times our planet’s mass, / looking small because you’re far, / I know exactly what you are.” Further verses clear the air about constellations (“at best / just a cosmic Rorschach test”), why stars twinkle, why they shine in different colors, how they can turn into neutron stars or black holes, and so on. Notes at the end, with small photos, offer further detail on these and other cosmic concepts. Saldaña sandwiches painted images of stars and star fields, planets, and dust clouds between views of two dark-haired beige-skinned children peering through a bedroom telescope at the night sky and using a printed guidebook to identify what they’re seeing, then falling asleep beneath a spray of stars projected by a night light. The technical vocabulary as well as the narrative’s coldly rational tone and blanket claims of certainty lay a heavy load on the original verse—but in the end the references to pulsars and supernovas, to billions of years and miles, and the uniqueness (so far) of our planet as a home for life amid the Milky Way’s “Quarter trillion stars” are less apt to quash the wondering than crank it up.
Nourishing fare for young stargazers who really, truly do “wonder what you are.” (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7006-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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