A mixed bag thematically but a delicious collection nevertheless. (Picture book/poetry. 6-11)
An eclectic collection of recipes—not for cooking but for life.
Employing myriad forms—from traditional sonnets to syncopated free verse—Singer hopscotches from themes revealing commonalities among food, recipes, and poetry to broader, kid-friendly treatments of nature, reading, and social studies. The collection starts with a definition: “What’s in a good recipe? / Something right for me and you / Steps to follow, A to Z.” Another poem draws parallels between writing and cooking: “Sometimes you must follow things strictly word for word. / Sometimes it’s more lively if you improvise.” A cluster of haiku becomes a guide to enjoying the seasons: “Pomegranate seeds: / In fall, I am rich enough / to dine on rubies.” Another poem muses on memories: “Sometimes it’s just a sharp whiff of mustard, / and you recall being at the ballpark.” Toward the end of the book, poems grow increasingly sophisticated, offering recipes for courage and understanding. Priceman’s playful combination of collage, printmaking, and energetic brush strokes evokes the offbeat nostalgia of a grandma’s recipe box. Her inclusion of a multiracial cast is commendable. While most of the poems tickle the imagination and roll smoothly off the tongue, a few fall flat, such as this that ends, “Although sometimes, / you’re bound to fail, / keep measuring—and use a scale.”
A mixed bag thematically but a delicious collection nevertheless. (Picture book/poetry. 6-11)Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2790-3
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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