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IZZY AND FRANK

Name: IZZY AND FRANK
Author: Katrina Lehman
ISBN: 978-1-950354-23-8

by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 7, 2020

Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones.

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Moving away from the island where she’s always lived, a little girl misses everything, especially her best friend.

Izzy loves living on an island in a lighthouse with a “staircase that twirled high into the sky.” Most of all, she loves her sea gull pal, Frank. On “gray-storm-rainy days,” they dig for buried treasure, play hide-and-seek, and draw in the sand. On “blue-sky-sunny days,” they swim with seals and hunt crabs or starfish. “Wild-wind-blowy days” they evade sea monsters and fight pirates. Then Izzy moves to the city, to a small house with “sharp corners” and no sea view. Izzy hates the city. The games other children play seem alien, and she must wear shoes and be quiet. She misses the wind, salt, sand, the lighthouse, the island, and, most of all, Frank. Izzy searches the streets and sky for Frank, and, one morning, he alights on her windowsill, ready to help her reinvent her life. Peppered with sensory images—“wind that whistled and wailed,” “crusty crabs,” and “sparkly, spiky starfish”—the alliterative text invites reading aloud. With its perky palette of aqua and orange, the simple, playful illustrations show Izzy as an exuberant white girl with freckles and unruly red curls who gradually adapts her free-spirited island life with Frank to an urban venue with new, diverse friends.

Beautifully pitched tale for kids leaving behind familiar places and moving to new ones. (Picture book. 3-7)

Pub Date: July 7, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-950354-23-8

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Scribble

Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
WREN
by Katrina Lehman ; illustrated by Sophie Beer

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LOVE FROM THE VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR

by Eric Carle ; illustrated by Eric Carle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 15, 2015

Safe to creep on by.

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Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.

In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.

Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)

Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HOLIDAYS & CELEBRATIONS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE FOOD?
edited by Eric Carle

- BOOK REVIEW
WHAT'S YOUR FAVORITE BUG?
edited by Eric Carle

- BOOK REVIEW
MY FIRST I SEE YOU
by Eric Carle ; illustrated by Eric Carle

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ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Laura Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

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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)