Other little animals drive cars around the room, illustrating common traffic mishaps. The canine cops patrol pretend...
A menagerie of small stuffed animals comes to life in a little boy’s room, with three diminutive dogs turning into traffic police officers on motorcycles.
Other little animals drive cars around the room, illustrating common traffic mishaps. The canine cops patrol pretend roadways around the bedroom, giving out traffic tickets to a speeding mouse and toad, cautioning a goose who runs a red light and sorting out a collision between a bear and a pig. The short, punchy text written in rhyming couplets uses just a few words per page to describe the traffic flow, with lots of action words and concluding exclamation marks revving up the plot. The illustrations, in oil paint on cotton canvas, have a dreamy quality, with muted hues and a mottled effect in the solid backgrounds. Though this complements the imaginary nature of the premise, it’s an odd contrast with the pithiness of the text, which calls out for vibrant primary colors. In a clever conclusion, the final page shows the toy vehicles parked on the floor around the bed, with the animals seated in rows with innocent faces. The little boy who owns the toys wears a puzzled expression—he’d left the cars in a shopping bag in the story’s opening illustration.Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-2485-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
Will make readers fall in love with the city depicted within.
From a nurse to an emergency dispatcher, a look at the city dwellers whose work begins when the sun goes down.
Reading this book is like looking through a telescope—there are windows on nearly every page; some pages feature rectangular, windowlike vignettes of people at work. On the front cover, a taxi driver is visible through the side window of a cab, with a dog sitting up in the back seat. Above them, on an upper floor, a museum worker is doing some vacuuming, with dinosaur bones in the background. Many of the people can be seen only from a great distance, and the details we learn about them often come from just a few spare sentences: “The museum is closed, but the janitor and security guard are hard at work.” Downing’s blue-tinged, cozy artwork sometimes makes words almost unnecessary—in this case, the accompanying illustration says it all, a full spread showing the janitor reaching up to dust the nose of a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton. Most of the people who are working late seem to be smiling, and while it’s difficult to find a message in the limited text, readers will close the book feeling that there’s joy to be found in every job and every schedule. The residents of this urban environment are diverse in skin tone. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Will make readers fall in love with the city depicted within. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-8234-5206-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Loewen’s story is a simple snapshot of kindergarten graduation day, and it stays true to form, with Yoshikawa’s artwork resembling photos that might be placed in an album—and the illustrations cheer, a mixed media of saturated color, remarkable depth and joyful expression. The author comfortably captures the hesitations of making the jump from kindergarten to first grade without making a fuss about it, and she makes the prospect something worth the effort. Trepidation aside, this is a reminder of how much fun kindergarten was: your own cubbyhole, the Halloween parade, losing a tooth, “the last time we’ll ever sit criss-cross applesauce together.” But there is also the fledgling’s pleasure at shucking off the past—swabbing the desks, tossing out the stubbiest crayons, taking the pictures off the wall—and surging into the future. Then there is graduation itself: donning the mortarboards, trooping into the auditorium—“Mr. Meyer starts playing a serious song on the piano. It makes me want to cry. It makes me want to march”—which will likely have a few adult readers feeling the same. (Picture book. 4-5)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5807-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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