A treasure house of mysteries large and small.
This Norwegian import is guaranteed to silence boastful Where’s Waldo grads.
It opens on a woodsy nature scene for zero, “No one,” before moving to a deceptively simple one (1) child in a bedroom who next joins his dad (2) for a forest outing. The count continues—by single digits to 30, then by various intervals to 1,000—on to depict crowd scenes in locales ranging from a library to a life drawing class, with many individualized figures (of diverse body type, skin tone, and hair texture and color) recurring. Inconspicuous captions below each picture offer either pointers to subtle visual cues or invitations to speculate about what they see. Of the 20 children in a classroom, for instance, “One of them is thinking about all the people who’ve lived before us. One of them has lost the class teddy bear. One of them is dreading football training. One of them will become prime minister.” Roskifte supplies some solutions, along with additional scenarios, at the close. She also gives viewers a bit of an assist by coloring in her small, doll-like humans throughout but leaving everything else as pale outlines. Switching at the end to a big blue marble floating in space, she rounds off the numbering with 7.5 billion followed by a barrage of leading questions, from what became of that lost teddy to lifelong posers, including the poignant “Does everyone share the same truth?”
A treasure house of mysteries large and small. (Picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4524-2
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
In a word, a feast for the eyes, brain, and artistic imagination.
Words and pictures connect in surprising, stimulating ways.
Talk about painting with words. Author/illustrator Paschkis plays with them, too, and encourages readers to do likewise. In the process, she explores the elasticity and seemingly endless possibilities of language. The vividly colored, wittily detailed, folk-style paintings on double-page spreads organically incorporate words into the artwork in wondrous, creative ways. Words frequently repeat in different sizes and colors; illustrated images include words that sound or are shaped like them, are variations of them, rhyme or nearly rhyme with them, sort of resemble them, are sort of spelled like them, etc. A bouquet of flowers in a vase sports roses exuding the scents of slumber, sultry, shush, and other evocative words beginning with S; on a daisy’s petals readers find dizzy, doozy, lazy, jazzy; lief, leap, life, and more decorate the leaves. Delightful words—many of which readers won’t know, and that’s OK—flex vocabulary and spelling muscles to the max and also enhance readers’ visual and auditory senses when the pictures are taken in. Furthermore, the spreads are connected to thought-provoking questions. Some inspired the paintings, or vice versa, and themselves contain examples of wordplay. Persons depicted have diverse skin tones. The book makes a great springboard for creative-thinking activities in writing and art units in classroom and library programs. Keep dictionaries handy. Endpapers abound with swirling words readers can savor (and look up).
In a word, a feast for the eyes, brain, and artistic imagination. (author's note) (Picture book. 6-10)Pub Date: July 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59270-353-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
This luck-of-the-Irish alphabet book cites Irish legends and symbols with intertwined one-stanza poems. Each one-page entry features tidbits of Irish culture and lore. “B is for the Blarney Stone / And for great Brian Boru. / Beware the piercing banshee’s cry is / Or else she’ll come for you”; “Q is for the Irish pirate queen; / Grace O’Malley was her name. / She captured many English ships, / And their treasures she did claim.” (Inexplicably, pirate queen Grace O'Malley is pictured on dry land next to a castle and holding a broadsword; there's not a hint of a seafarer about the picture.) Some letters are stretches, as with most alphabet books: T is for the three colors on the Irish flag; U is for uilleann pipes; Gaelic has no letter X, except in names of Irish towns like Foxrock. And one has to wonder how many children in the book's audience will care about "J is for James Joyce." The format is typical, with color illustrations staging each ornately embellished capital letter and a few double-page spreads. One page of back matter provides a two-word glossary, a list of the 32 Irish counties and the lyrics to the song "Molly Malone." The device works tolerably but more contextualization and greater sensitivity to the audience level would have made the book more useful. (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58980-745-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Pelican
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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