A whimsical exploration of the hydrological cycle pairing scientific inquiry with childhood imagination.
In Corbett’s debut picture book, a young girl befriends a creature made from water.
Polly, a rosy-cheeked young blonde girl with fair skin, has always loved water; the sound of rain, the flow of the river, the splash that comes from jumping in puddles. One day, a patch of river water winks at Polly. It rises up into a smiling-faced wave, which she names “Sparkles.” Polly and Sparkles become friends, but Sparkles can’t stay long. It is tied to the water cycle—it evaporates into vapor, condenses to form clouds, and rains back down. Polly is worried for her new friend (especially when it is up in the dark storm clouds) but learns to recognize Sparkles in all its manifestations. Corbett writes in straightforward, non-rhyming text, allowing the poetry of nature to speak for itself: “When she got there, her reflection bounced off the water. Polly took a deep breath and smiled. She tossed in some pebbles, watching as the ripples grew bigger and bigger until they joined the calm flow of the river.” LeDuc makes deft use of ink and watercolors to bring the outdoors to life (note especially the rain, river and trees) and capture Polly’s ramblings (her open-faced innocence calls to mind the children in Helen Oxenbury’s illustrations for 1989’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt). At story’s end, a nonfiction addendum offers further explication of the water cycle.
A whimsical exploration of the hydrological cycle pairing scientific inquiry with childhood imagination.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781633814707
Page Count: 37
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard.
A grouchy sapling on a Christmas tree farm finds that there are better things than lights and decorations for its branches.
A Grinch among the other trees on the farm is determined never to become a sappy Christmas tree—and never to leave its spot. Its determination makes it so: It grows gnarled and twisted and needle-less. As time passes, the farm is swallowed by the suburbs. The neighborhood kids dare one another to climb the scary, grumpy-looking tree, and soon, they are using its branches for their imaginative play, the tree serving as a pirate ship, a fort, a spaceship, and a dragon. But in winter, the tree stands alone and feels bereft and lonely for the first time ever, and it can’t look away from the decorated tree inside the house next to its lot. When some parents threaten to cut the “horrible” tree down, the tree thinks, “Not now that my limbs are full of happy children,” showing how far it has come. Happily for the tree, the children won’t give up so easily, and though the tree never wished to become a Christmas tree, it’s perfectly content being a “trick or tree.” Martinez’s digital illustrations play up the humorous dichotomy between the happy, aspiring Christmas trees (and their shoppers) and the grumpy tree, and the diverse humans are satisfyingly expressive.
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7335-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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