A little absurd, a little breezy, this rhyming story helps make rhyming easy.
In this illustrated children’s book, a young rock believes he cannot rhyme—but he underestimates his own prowess.
Ricky, a rock wrapped in vines who wears a rainbow feather on his head, attends a school populated exclusively by other irregularly shaped gray stones that come in an intriguing range of sizes. Ricky loves school—until his reading and writing teacher introduces rhyming. She does this by calling up several imaginary scenarios—“oodles of poodles and noodles,” a bear eating an eclair—which confuse Ricky and leave the fundamental concept fuzzy. Ricky’s friend Tess follows him as they roll home through farmland, trying to coax her pal into experimenting with verse—which he does, albeit accidentally: “Can you think of a word that would rhyme with that Cow?” / “I don’t want to right now.” After several explosions of accidental rhyme, Ricky figures out that he can, in fact, compose verse (“Ricky then realized not trying was wrong— / He had no idea he could rhyme all along!”). He presents a tale of his own journey to his teacher the following day (“I’ve finished my story, and it’s really sublime, / Called ‘Ricky, the Rock That Just Couldn’t Rhyme’ ”). Young readers will find Mr. Jay’s rhythmic pattern of couplets comforting, and the narrative neatly gives beginning students of rhyme plenty of examples to work with. An ending stanza that cuts off without resolving its rhyme invites readers to finish the piece. Wozniak’s sharp-lined pictures are mostly black and white, except for gray rocks, Ricky’s feather, and all rhyming items in the characters’ surroundings—for example, the duck on a truck that is stuck in the muck.
A little absurd, a little breezy, this rhyming story helps make rhyming easy.Pub Date: March 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781958514061
Page Count: 32
Publisher: New Paige Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity.
A collection of parental wishes for a child.
It starts out simply enough: two children run pell-mell across an open field, one holding a high-flying kite with the line “I wish you more ups than downs.” But on subsequent pages, some of the analogous concepts are confusing or ambiguous. The line “I wish you more tippy-toes than deep” accompanies a picture of a boy happily swimming in a pool. His feet are visible, but it's not clear whether he's floating in the deep end or standing in the shallow. Then there's a picture of a boy on a beach, his pockets bulging with driftwood and colorful shells, looking frustrated that his pockets won't hold the rest of his beachcombing treasures, which lie tantalizingly before him on the sand. The line reads: “I wish you more treasures than pockets.” Most children will feel the better wish would be that he had just the right amount of pockets for his treasures. Some of the wordplay, such as “more can than knot” and “more pause than fast-forward,” will tickle older readers with their accompanying, comical illustrations. The beautifully simple pictures are a sweet, kid- and parent-appealing blend of comic-strip style and fine art; the cast of children depicted is commendably multiethnic.
Although the love comes shining through, the text often confuses in straining for patterned simplicity. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2699-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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