A great moral lesson for children, hindered by awkward visuals.
This sweet rhyming picture book concerns a little girl who discovers that some of life's greatest treasures are intangible.
Toting her red pail to the ocean one summer day, Bea Moore has only one goal in mind–to find and collect seashells. But Bea doesn’t want just one or two. Behaving like a typical child, she feels a sense of entitlement and ownership, explaining, "They were there just for me / all the shells that I saw– / so I gathered them quickly / for I wanted them all." A nearby fisherman explains the importance of sharing, how grateful he is for every fish that he catches and that he never catches any more than he needs. Later, when Bea discovers an important new friendship, she comes to understand his wise words. Catanzarite's writing can be lovely and simple–"As the waves rolled on in / with magnificent grace, / the wind from their roar / kissed the cheeks of my face.” But some lines are awkward and seem chosen only to fit the rhyme scheme–"It was then a tall man / who was fishing that day / said to me, 'Little child–/ why pick all shells that lay?' " The illustrations have unusual, varying points of view and are cropped at such places as to produce interesting compositions. Scenery and figures are very simple and well-drawn, but the illustrations jump from realistic (as in the detailed face and hands of the fisherman) to cartoonish. Bea is two-dimensional, her arms are stick thin and in all but one close-up, her eyes are black ovals with no reflective light. The inconsistency of the illustrative technique is distracting, and in some pictures the marker and crayon lines are conspicuous, which do a disservice. Still, children will identify with Bea’s conflicting feelings, appreciate her final acts of empathy and kindness, and may be more forgiving than adults of the illustrations’ shortcomings.
A great moral lesson for children, hindered by awkward visuals.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4251-6321-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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