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
A sweet, if oft-told, story.
A plush toy rabbit bonds with a boy and watches him grow into adulthood.
The boy receives the blue bunny for his birthday and immediately becomes attached to it. Unbeknownst to him, the ungendered bunny is sentient; it engages in dialogue with fellow toys, giving readers insight into its thoughts. The bunny's goal is to have grand adventures when the boy grows up and no longer needs its company. The boy spends many years playing imaginatively with the bunny, holding it close during both joyous and sorrowful times and taking it along on family trips. As a young man, he marries, starts a family, and hands over the beloved toy to his toddler-aged child in a crib. The bunny's epiphany—that he does not need to wait for great adventures since all his dreams have already come true in the boy's company—is explicitly stated in the lengthy text, which is in many ways similar to The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). The illustrations, which look hand-painted but were digitally created, are moderately sentimental with an impressionistic dreaminess (one illustration even includes a bunny-shaped cloud in the sky) and a warm glow throughout. The depiction of a teenage male openly displaying his emotions—hugging his beloved childhood toy for example—is refreshing. All human characters present as White expect for one of the boy’s friends who is Black.
A sweet, if oft-told, story. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72825-448-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard.
A grouchy sapling on a Christmas tree farm finds that there are better things than lights and decorations for its branches.
A Grinch among the other trees on the farm is determined never to become a sappy Christmas tree—and never to leave its spot. Its determination makes it so: It grows gnarled and twisted and needle-less. As time passes, the farm is swallowed by the suburbs. The neighborhood kids dare one another to climb the scary, grumpy-looking tree, and soon, they are using its branches for their imaginative play, the tree serving as a pirate ship, a fort, a spaceship, and a dragon. But in winter, the tree stands alone and feels bereft and lonely for the first time ever, and it can’t look away from the decorated tree inside the house next to its lot. When some parents threaten to cut the “horrible” tree down, the tree thinks, “Not now that my limbs are full of happy children,” showing how far it has come. Happily for the tree, the children won’t give up so easily, and though the tree never wished to become a Christmas tree, it’s perfectly content being a “trick or tree.” Martinez’s digital illustrations play up the humorous dichotomy between the happy, aspiring Christmas trees (and their shoppers) and the grumpy tree, and the diverse humans are satisfyingly expressive.
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7335-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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