A beautifully realized and delightful celebration of night and sunrise.
A young narrator says goodnight to his cat, Sylvie, who later wakes him to beckon him to an adventure in the early hours.
In Gerstein’s pen, ink, and acrylic art against gray paper, the night world of hallway, sleeping family, front walk, and garden is recognizable—yet everything is shadowed and quiet. When child and cat step out of the house, a stippling of bright stars across the night sky echoes the sweeping Milky Way reproduced on the endpapers. Gerstein’s darkness has softness and depth: here the night world is benign, and for all its strangeness, it is simply, though possibly magically, different. The narrator hears animal voices expressing expectation (“It’s almost here”); he speaks with his cat and with a porcupine on his front lawn. He hears the increasing volume of birdsong; the sky pales with light; a bear in the shadows slips away as the dawn arrives. Children lucky enough to experience a summer night in the country—or even the suburbs—without artificial light may get to experience this arrival of early morning, which has its own fanfare: at first mysterious, then spectacular, bold, bright. Gerstein’s morning sky practically sings its own hymn. Everything in the young protagonist’s world looks different in the daytime: the front walkway, bright roses, and sunflowers.
A beautifully realized and delightful celebration of night and sunrise. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-18822-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
PROFILES
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story.
A home-renovation project is interrupted by a family of wrens, allowing a young girl an up-close glimpse of nature.
Renata and her father enjoy working on upgrading their bathroom, installing a clawfoot bathtub, and cutting a space for a new window. One warm night, after Papi leaves the window space open, two wrens begin making a nest in the bathroom. Rather than seeing it as an unfortunate delay of their project, Renata and Papi decide to let the avian carpenters continue their work. Renata witnesses the birth of four chicks as their rosy eggs split open “like coats that are suddenly too small.” Renata finds at a crucial moment that she can help the chicks learn to fly, even with the bittersweet knowledge that it will only hasten their exits from her life. Rosen uses lively language and well-chosen details to move the story of the baby birds forward. The text suggests the strong bond built by this Afro-Latinx father and daughter with their ongoing project without needing to point it out explicitly, a light touch in a picture book full of delicate, well-drawn moments and precise wording. Garoche’s drawings are impressively detailed, from the nest’s many small bits to the developing first feathers on the chicks and the wall smudges and exposed wiring of the renovation. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-20-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)
Renata’s wren encounter proves magical, one most children could only wish to experience outside of this lovely story. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-12320-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
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