Christmas Eve isn’t always a time of calm, peace, and perfect plans. Sometimes a family is traveling to another destination and complications ensue, as is the case with this short, touching story by Rosenberg (17: A Novel in Prose Poems, p. 1318, etc.). The unnamed first-person narrator looks back to a snowy Christmas Eve when he was four or five and on the way to his aunt’s house with his parents, older brother, and baby sister. A snowstorm forces the family to stop for the night at a roadside motel with a star on its sign (and as luck would have it, there is room at this inn). The moody, dark illustrations, both in colors and in feeling, effectively show the disappointed children and the exhausted parents trying to do their best. Will Santa miss them in their snowbound motel? As the mother in the story says, “He always finds a way.” The young narrator wakes in the middle of the night in time to hear the bells, see the reindeer, and meet Santa himself. Clapp’s (The Prince of Butterflies, p. 332) stunning illustrations make readers into believers: in one spread that is pure magic, the child’s face is lit with joy as Santa flings toys and packages into the room, each gift surrounded by golden light. Another memorable spread shows Santa pointing at the starry sky, where mysterious, misty letters spell out the beginnings of Christmas wishes. The understated text, nighttime setting, and varied perspectives will remind many of Van Allsburg’s Polar Express, but this Christmas Eve tale creates a magic all its own. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7613-1627-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Safe to creep on by.
Carle’s famous caterpillar expresses its love.
In three sentences that stretch out over most of the book’s 32 pages, the (here, at least) not-so-ravenous larva first describes the object of its love, then describes how that loved one makes it feel before concluding, “That’s why… / I[heart]U.” There is little original in either visual or textual content, much of it mined from The Very Hungry Caterpillar. “You are… / …so sweet,” proclaims the caterpillar as it crawls through the hole it’s munched in a strawberry; “…the cherry on my cake,” it says as it perches on the familiar square of chocolate cake; “…the apple of my eye,” it announces as it emerges from an apple. Images familiar from other works join the smiling sun that shone down on the caterpillar as it delivers assurances that “you make… / …the sun shine brighter / …the stars sparkle,” and so on. The book is small, only 7 inches high and 5 ¾ inches across when closed—probably not coincidentally about the size of a greeting card. While generations of children have grown up with the ravenous caterpillar, this collection of Carle imagery and platitudinous sentiment has little of his classic’s charm. The melding of Carle’s caterpillar with Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE on the book’s cover, alas, draws further attention to its derivative nature.
Safe to creep on by. (Picture book. 3-6)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-448-48932-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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