This poetic celebration of the impermanence and unpredictability of seasons is a delight for pluviophiles and heliophiles...
Lyrical text invites friends to look closer and explore together as the seasons turn.
Outdoor play in a four-season climate requires flexibility and creativity due to changeable weather, and the children in this book are experts! A white boy and girl join a black boy and girl (gender cued via hairstyle and clothing) to go sledding in the snow, spy on animals emerging from deep wintry sleep, dig in thawing mud, watch clouds atop a flowery hill, soak in beachy sun, and leap into leaf piles. The children take turns being featured up close in painterly, gouache illustrations done in gently muted colors. Frosty breaths, breezes, and cottony clouds sometimes transform into recurring swirled motifs that contain birds, a unicorn, or a frosty deer. Endpapers further showcase the wind motif at the beginning amid raindrops and at the end amid snowflakes, underscoring the book’s temporal journey that begins on the front cover. Precise, descriptive couplets dance between descriptions of the fragility and unpredictability of nature and the dependability and strength of a deep friendship that is both interracial and ordinary. Young readers will find lots of ideas for how to explore their world throughout the year. Each spread also contains many natural elements that can be highlighted in STEM storytimes.
This poetic celebration of the impermanence and unpredictability of seasons is a delight for pluviophiles and heliophiles alike . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5918-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees.
After Duncan finds his crayons gone—yet again—letters arrive, detailing their adventures in friendship.
Eleven crayons send missives from their chosen spots throughout Duncan’s home (and one from his classroom). Red enjoys the thrill of extinguishing “pretend fires” with Duncan’s toy firetruck. White, so often dismissed as invisible, finds a new calling subbing in for the missing queen on the black-and-white chessboard. “Now everyone ALWAYS SEES ME!…(Well, half the time!)” Pink’s living the dream as a pastry chef helming the Breezy Bake Oven, “baking everything from little cupcakes…to…OTHER little cupcakes!” Teal, who’s hitched a ride to school in Duncan’s backpack, meets the crayons in the boy’s desk and writes, “Guess what? I HAVE A TWIN! How come you never told me?” Duncan wants to see his crayons and “meet their new friends.” A culminating dinner party assembles the crayons and their many guests: a table tennis ball, dog biscuits, a well-loved teddy bear, and more. The premise—personified crayons, away and back again—is well-trammeled territory by now, after over a dozen books and spinoffs, and Jeffers once more delivers his signature cartooning and hand-lettering. Though the pages lack the laugh-out-loud sight gags and side-splittingly funny asides of previous outings, readers—especially fans of the crayons’ previous outings—will enjoy checking in on their pals.
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593622360
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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