Endearing, engaging text pairs well with gorgeously executed illustrations for a joyful read.
Smetana’s picture book compares feelings of love to different elements of a garden.
Opening with its title, this work uses simple nonrhyming sentences to describe love, using various metaphors that encourage youngsters to engage all their senses. Love is said to be as “tender as a blade of grass,” “sweet as a flowering lilac,” “cheerful as the robin’s song,” and so on. The lines are brief but powerful and sweet, concluding with an image of two hands with different brown skin tones on either side of a bouquet, incorporating all the flowers featured in the book. However, Smetana’s illustrations are truly the stars of this work. At first glance, they appear to be vibrant watercolors on paper, but closer inspection reveals each image to be a carefully trimmed and assembled collage featuring butterflies, flowers, trees, and other elements. The cut paper is arranged in ingenious ways to suggest, for example, the opened petals of a rose or furrowed soil with marigolds growing in it. The book ends with a glossary, naming various plants and animals in the book and encouraging young readers to go back and look for them all—something that they’ll surely delight in doing again and again.
Endearing, engaging text pairs well with gorgeously executed illustrations for a joyful read.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781737140962
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Flying Cardinal Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Though told by two outsiders to the culture, this timely and well-crafted story will educate readers on the preciousness of...
An international story tackles a serious global issue with Reynolds’ characteristic visual whimsy.
Gie Gie—aka Princess Gie Gie—lives with her parents in Burkina Faso. In her kingdom under “the African sky, so wild and so close,” she can tame wild dogs with her song and make grass sway, but despite grand attempts, she can neither bring the water closer to home nor make it clean. French words such as “maintenant!” (now!) and “maman” (mother) and local color like the karite tree and shea nuts place the story in a French-speaking African country. Every morning, Gie Gie and her mother perch rings of cloth and large clay pots on their heads and walk miles to the nearest well to fetch murky, brown water. The story is inspired by model Georgie Badiel, who founded the Georgie Badiel Foundation to make clean water accessible to West Africans. The details in Reynolds’ expressive illustrations highlight the beauty of the West African landscape and of Princess Gie Gie, with her cornrowed and beaded hair, but will also help readers understand that everyone needs clean water—from the children of Burkina Faso to the children of Flint, Michigan.
Though told by two outsiders to the culture, this timely and well-crafted story will educate readers on the preciousness of potable water. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17258-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
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)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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