An engaging conversation starter for parents and children about growth, change, death, and life.
Seven circles of light explore mortality in this spiritual picture book.
In a fairy-tale–like opening, the Brightest Light lives alone, content, in the Big Quiet. But “one day, a Sharp Desire came…and changed everything.” The Brightest Light, looking like a soft white ball surrounded by darkness, encounters a prism that refracts light into colors. Now, the Brightest Light and seven balls of color live happily until the colors encounter a desire for more. The colors leave the Big Quiet for a world like Earth, becoming plants, animals, forces of nature, and humans. Violet and Red turn into lonely human girls who find each other and become friends, experiencing the strange feeling that they’ve met before. Eventually, the colors realize the time is coming to leave their incarnations and return to the Brightest Light, once again content until the desire for change resurfaces. Lucas does an impressive job of making this philosophical theme feel approachable and grounded. The author’s images vary in style. One resembles a doodle in a digital paint program while the images on the Earth-like world are more detailed cartoon illustrations with full backgrounds and a diverse human cast. Her handling of time passing in a panel-packed page seems natural, and the hints at death feel merely part of a cycle rather than sad.
An engaging conversation starter for parents and children about growth, change, death, and life.Pub Date: July 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73479-220-1
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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