Don’t waste time: Pick up this fun, ecologically minded read.
A playful introduction to the serious topic of food waste.
As this picture book opens, the city of Fridge-Opolis has a serious pollution problem caused by rotting and expired food. Cartoon-style illustrations use wavy lines to indicate the malodorous stench emanating from the foods while also employing color, perspective, and crowding of forms and shapes to create a messy, chaotic setting. Meanwhile, rhyming text with a singsong cadence reads, “Lettuce had long ago wilted. / Rhubarb was bitter and rude. / The overripe pineapple prickled. / Even broccoli was in a bad mood.” Wordplay abounds as the untenable situation unravels, and after a food fight breaks out, anthropomorphic, mustachioed Mayor Mayonnaise resolves to clean things up. He enlists the help of Doctor Baking Soda, who scrubs the refrigerator clean and gets rid of spoiled food, leaving “only food safe to eat.” At book’s end, Recycling Ridge and Compost Town are introduced as new additions to the kitchen community, pointing toward ongoing efforts to reduce and responsibly deal with waste. Accessible, well-designed backmatter includes statistics and information about food waste in the United States to offer a sobering and inspiring call for readers to help “reach our national goal of cutting food waste and loss in half by 2030.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Don’t waste time: Pick up this fun, ecologically minded read. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4998-1254-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Little Bee Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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 comical, fresh look at crayons and color
Duncan wants to draw, but instead of crayons, he finds a stack of letters listing the crayons’ demands in this humorous tale.
Red is overworked, laboring even on holidays. Gray is exhausted from coloring expansive spaces (elephants, rhinos and whales). Black wants to be considered a color-in color, and Peach? He’s naked without his wrapper! This anthropomorphized lot amicably requests workplace changes in hand-lettered writing, explaining their work stoppage to a surprised Duncan. Some are tired, others underutilized, while a few want official titles. With a little creativity and a lot of color, Duncan saves the day. Jeffers delivers energetic and playful illustrations, done in pencil, paint and crayon. The drawings are loose and lively, and with few lines, he makes his characters effectively emote. Clever spreads, such as Duncan’s “white cat in the snow” perfectly capture the crayons’ conundrum, and photographic representations of both the letters and coloring pages offer another layer of texture, lending to the tale’s overall believability.
A comical, fresh look at crayons and color . (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-399-25537-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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