A moving celebration of cultural and personal resilience.
A child’s world is upended during India’s Partition.
Veena loves her family’s kitchen, a place “full of warmth and words.” She especially adores the buttery, round rotis that the women in her family make using local grains. She practices, and although her first attempts are misshapen, she’s soon able to make perfectly round rotis. Everything changes when India wins its independence from Great Britain and is subsequently partitioned into two countries—India and Pakistan—divided along religious lines. While many believe nothing will change, her father presciently declares, “India will no longer be the same.” Sure enough, Veena and her family are forced to flee their home in the middle of the night. They end up in a refugee camp, where they eat strangely hard, red rotis. Veena heads to the camp kitchen, where she finds a sense of belonging as she makes rotis. When Veena and her family finally relocate to Delhi, India, she brings her rotis and the memories they hold into a brand-new kitchen and life. Inspired by the author’s grandparents’ experiences, this picture book provides a tender, optimistic look at one of the subcontinent’s darkest chapters. Though the book includes a map, readers may initially find it unclear whether Veena and her family are crossing into Pakistan or India. Still, the tale has a strong, specific emotional core, enhanced by gentle earth-toned images that leaven the often difficult subject matter.
A moving celebration of cultural and personal resilience. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781525307355
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Fun times, fond friends, and a festive farmyard setting—little ones will be charmed.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Toad and Little Blue Truck get ready for a hayride.
After the titular vehicle is loaded with hay, Toad is nowhere to be found. “Beep! Beep! Beep! Where are you, Toad?” asks Little Blue Truck. All the barnyard animals look for him. Sheep searches the meadow. Goose and Duck check the pond. Others pitch in, too, but Toad seems to have disappeared…until Hen hears snoring coming from the pile of hay in the back of Little Blue Truck. Although the text’s scansion is imperfect in places (adults may want to pre-read to ensure a smooth read-aloud), the bouncy meter and rhyming text nevertheless capture the energy of the search and the farmyard community’s concern for Toad’s safety, making this a solid storytime choice. Eye-catching illustrations with rich, fully saturated colors balance the right level of detail while still highlighting the animal that is the focus of each verse. By introducing one farm animal at a time, Schertle also helps the youngest readers begin to identify barnyard animals by name and understand their unique farm homes. Traditional animal sounds are part of the text, and listeners will add them to their vocabulary. It all ends with the promised hayride, bringing the tale to a joyous ending.
Fun times, fond friends, and a festive farmyard setting—little ones will be charmed. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2026
ISBN: 9780063436121
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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