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
Though told by two outsiders to the culture, this timely and well-crafted story will educate readers on the preciousness of...
An international story tackles a serious global issue with Reynolds’ characteristic visual whimsy.
Gie Gie—aka Princess Gie Gie—lives with her parents in Burkina Faso. In her kingdom under “the African sky, so wild and so close,” she can tame wild dogs with her song and make grass sway, but despite grand attempts, she can neither bring the water closer to home nor make it clean. French words such as “maintenant!” (now!) and “maman” (mother) and local color like the karite tree and shea nuts place the story in a French-speaking African country. Every morning, Gie Gie and her mother perch rings of cloth and large clay pots on their heads and walk miles to the nearest well to fetch murky, brown water. The story is inspired by model Georgie Badiel, who founded the Georgie Badiel Foundation to make clean water accessible to West Africans. The details in Reynolds’ expressive illustrations highlight the beauty of the West African landscape and of Princess Gie Gie, with her cornrowed and beaded hair, but will also help readers understand that everyone needs clean water—from the children of Burkina Faso to the children of Flint, Michigan.
Though told by two outsiders to the culture, this timely and well-crafted story will educate readers on the preciousness of potable water. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17258-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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