Fry bread is much more than food, as this book amply demonstrates.
A bright picture book invites kids to cook with a Native American grandma.
Kids of all races carry flour, salt, baking powder, and other supplies into the kitchen to make dough for fry bread. Flour dusts the counter as oil sizzles on the stove. Veggies, beans, and honey make up the list of toppings, and when the meal is ready, everyone is invited to join the feast. Community love is depicted in this book as its characters gather on Indigenous land across the continent—indoors, outdoors, while making art or gazing at the night sky. This is about more than food, referencing cultural issues such as the history of displacement, starvation, and the struggle to survive, albeit in subtle ways appropriate for young children. With buoyant, heartfelt illustrations that show the diversity in Native America, the book tells the story of a post-colonial food, a shared tradition across the North American continent. Broken down into headings that celebrate what fry bread is, this story reaches readers both young and old thanks to the author’s note at the back of the book that dives into the social ways, foodways, and politics of America’s 573 recognized tribes. Through this topic that includes the diversity of so many Native peoples in a single story, Maillard (Mekusukey Seminole) promotes unity and familiarity among nations.
Fry bread is much more than food, as this book amply demonstrates. (recipe) (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-62672-746-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
While in no way pushing the creative envelope, this light-verse picture book still has much to offer pre-readers looking for...
Thirty poetic firecrackers chronicle a young child’s day.
Combining themes that worked well in the popular Crocodiles Say… (2005) and Crocodiles Play! (2009, both illustrated by Rae Maté), here Heidbreder joins forces with illustrator Smith to capture children at their most active and carefree as they go about their routines from dawn to bedtime. Together, these Canadian creators paint a warm portrait of suburban daily life, with kids enjoying their friends, siblings, pets, sunshine—all the basic pleasures of the moment. Heidbreder’s five-line sonic bursts, such as “Now Back Down,” are generally not contemplative poems but employ tight trochaic dimeter and trimeter to underscore the joy to be had in getting out in the world and exploring: “Bummy-wiggle. / Slip-down…THUD! / Gurpy-slurpy. / Hello, mud! / Plop!” And Smith’s simple, retro illustrations, rendered in pencil and colored digitally, ably depict the action of various scenes, using bold colors and spare facial expressions to show children, pets and yard animals like rabbits and birds at play. Notably absent from these illustrations are adults, whose influence is only subtly felt, as providers of a picnic or dinnertime spread, or heard in reconciling a playground spat or lending behavioral suggestions (especially regarding table manners).
While in no way pushing the creative envelope, this light-verse picture book still has much to offer pre-readers looking for affirmation of what constitutes a full day of fun. (Picture book/poetry. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55453-706-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A broad, if hardly more than skin-deep, introduction to the topic.
Four double-foldout spreads literally extend this first gander at our body’s insides and outsides—to jumbo, if not quite life, size.
Labels, basic facts, and one-sentence comments surround full-length cartoon images of the skeleton, musculature, and major sections of the body on the foldouts. Selected parts from the brain on down to blood cells are covered on the leaves in between. Lacey dishes out explanations of major body systems and processes in resolutely nontechnical language: “When you eat, food goes on a long twisty journey, zigzagging through tubes and turning into a soupy mush for your body to use.” It’s lightly spiced with observations that, for instance, the “gluteus maximus” is the largest muscle or the spine is made up of “vertebrae.” So light is the once-over, however, that the lymphatic, renal, and most of the endocrine systems escape notice (kidneys, where are you?). Moreover, though printed on durable card stock, the foldouts make for unwieldy handling, and on some pages, images are so scattered that successive stages of various processes require numbering. Still, Web links on the publisher’s page will presumably help to cover the gaps (unavailable for review). An overview of human development from fertilization to adulthood precedes a closing flurry of height extremes and other “Amazing body facts” that provide proper closure for this elementary survey.
A broad, if hardly more than skin-deep, introduction to the topic. (Nonfiction. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7945-3596-4
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Usborne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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