With LGBTQ topics becoming more common in books for the youngest audiences, this attempt can be safely passed over.
Twenty-six gay and gay-adjacent topics arranged alphabetically.
In sometimes-rhyming stanzas, Webb introduces a variety of LGBTQ terminology for young people. Some are only theoretically queer, such as “M is for MOUNTAIN / The peaks that you’ll move / with courage and strength / found deep inside you.” Others are more specific: “L is for LESBIAN / It’s love and affection / between two special girls / who share a connection.” It’s immediately clear that scansion and rhythm are not particularly important to the author of this text. Accuracy also takes a hit in some cases, especially with “I is for INTERSEX / Some are born with the parts / of both a boy and a girl; / bodies are works of art!” The simplistic, narrow focus on “girl and boy parts” both misleads readers about intersex conditions and fails to honor trans identities. Other complex ideas with lengthy histories in particularly racialized or gendered LGBTQ communities, such as “kiki” and “vogue,” are similarly flattened. The juvenile, artless illustrations show four unidentified children, two with darker skin and two with lighter skin, playing, dancing, cooking, and brushing their teeth. Letters of the alphabet are boldly featured in the background illustrations.
With LGBTQ topics becoming more common in books for the youngest audiences, this attempt can be safely passed over. (glossary) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68369-162-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
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
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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