Deft wordplay and lovely art blend for a tale of a most magical snowy day.
Compelling verse brings complicated science to elegant life.
Much as she did in her thunderstorm-centric Zap! Clap! BOOM! (2023), Salas hones her informational rhymes once more. This time her eyes are on snowstorms, which, as she notes, are so much more than “rain that freezes.” While down below two kids and their dog wait for a snowy day, “high above the winter land, / the jet stream flows—a narrow band. / Whose roaring, gusting winds divide / and pull in air from either side.” Water vapor adheres to dust, and snowflakes slowly form. With exquisite clarity, Salas’ gentle verse speaks to the poetic beauty of a first snow while gently leading readers through the very real science (“Ten miles up the jet stream flows”). A final, triumphant view of the children and their parent, joined by a group of others, as they all sled and build a snowman conveys the sheer fun of snow. Similarly, Fedele’s artwork, rendered in watercolor, gouache, and colored pencil and edited digitally, excels both in its depiction of a joyful wintry romp and in its accurate renderings of the different types of flakes. Backmatter provides more context to the science of snow, making this an ideal companion to titles such as Jacqueline Briggs Martin and Mary Azarian’s Snowflake Bentley (1998). Most characters are pale-skinned.
Deft wordplay and lovely art blend for a tale of a most magical snowy day. (bibliography, additional resources) (Informational picture book. 4-9)Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781547603503
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Adventure, humor, and smart, likable characters make for a winning chapter book.
Ada Twist’s incessant stream of questions leads to answers that help solve a neighborhood crisis.
Ada conducts experiments at home to answer questions such as, why does Mom’s coffee smell stronger than Dad’s coffee? Each answer leads to another question, another hypothesis, and another experiment, which is how she goes from collecting data on backyard birds for a citizen-science project to helping Rosie Revere figure out how to get her uncle Ned down from the sky, where his helium-filled “perilous pants” are keeping him afloat. The Questioneers—Rosie the engineer, Iggy Peck the architect, and Ada the scientist—work together, asking questions like scientists. Armed with knowledge (of molecules and air pressure, force and temperature) but more importantly, with curiosity, Ada works out a solution. Ada is a recognizable, three-dimensional girl in this delightfully silly chapter book: tirelessly curious and determined yet easily excited and still learning to express herself. If science concepts aren’t completely clear in this romp, relationships and emotions certainly are. In playful full- and half-page illustrations that break up the text, Ada is black with Afro-textured hair; Rosie and Iggy are white. A closing section on citizen science may inspire readers to get involved in science too; on the other hand, the “Ode to a Gas!” may just puzzle them. Other backmatter topics include the importance of bird study and the threat palm-oil use poses to rainforests.
Adventure, humor, and smart, likable characters make for a winning chapter book. (Fiction. 6-9)Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3422-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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