This tale of friends enjoying wintry activities at home and out in the snowy world is downright charming.
Three animal friends enjoy winter activities such as sledding, skating, and ice hockey as well as baking cookies and creating garlands of popcorn and apple slices for birds.
The anthropomorphic characters are a white bear named Berry, a beige squirrel named Ginger, and a timid, pale blue bunny named Willow. The bear and squirrel are excited to play outdoors in the snow, but Willow prefers staying indoors with cocoa and marshmallows. Berry and Ginger encourage Willow, and she finds she enjoys ice hockey when she scores a goal. Intriguing photographic illustrations use small fabric sculptures for the animals with tiny props and relevant costumes such as felt skates and knitted sweaters and hats. The animals are photographed in miniature scenes of snowy outdoor settings and inside the cozy, pink house the friends share. A loosely rhyming text uses different rhyme schemes on each page, with evocative rhyming word pairs describing the activities of the animals. The language includes rich vocabulary such as “squooshed,” “whoosh,” “whirling,” and “shimmering,” and a running gag uses puns with the word “snow” substituted for “so” as in the title.
This tale of friends enjoying wintry activities at home and out in the snowy world is downright charming. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-274112-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A solid, small step for diversifying STEM stories.
What does Annie want to be?
As career day approaches, Annie wants to keep her job choice secret until her family sees her presentation at school. Readers will figure it out, however, through the title and clues Tadgell incorporates into the illustrations. Family members make guesses about her ambitions that are tied to their own passions, although her brother watches as she completes her costume in a bedroom with a Mae Jemison poster, starry décor, and a telescope. There’s a celebratory mood at the culminating presentation, where Annie says she wants to “soar high through the air” like her basketball-playing mother, “explore faraway places” like her hiker dad, and “be brave and bold” like her baker grandmother (this feels forced, but oven mitts are part of her astronaut costume) so “the whole world will hear my exciting stories” like her reporter grandfather. Annie jumps off a chair to “BLAST OFF” in a small illustration superimposed on a larger picture depicting her floating in space with a reddish ground below. It’s unclear if Annie imagines this scene or if it’s her future-self exploring Mars, but either scenario fits the aspirational story. Backmatter provides further reading suggestions and information about the moon and four women astronauts, one of whom is Jemison. Annie and her family are all black.
A solid, small step for diversifying STEM stories. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-88448-523-0
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
This pleasant look at gardening in a city setting reflects a growing trend.
Several inner-city children work together to plant seeds and cultivate their own gardens, transforming their little “anywhere farms” into a lush, green community garden covering a vacant city lot.
A pink-cheeked little girl in overalls receives a single seed from a helpful tan-skinned neighbor on the title page, and she then inspires a flurry of gardening in her neighborhood with children and adults of different ethnicities joining in, including a white boy who uses a wheelchair. The bouncy, rhyming text conveys the basic requirements of growing plants from seeds as well as suggesting a wide variety of unusual containers for growing plants. Several leading questions about the plant growth cycle are interspersed within the story, set in large type on full pages that show a seed gradually sprouting and growing into a huge sunflower on the final, wordless page. The joyful text makes growing flowers and vegetables seem easy, showing plants spilling out of alternative containers as well as more traditional raised beds and the concluding, large garden plot. The text focuses on the titular concept of an “anywhere farm,” without differentiating between farms and gardens, but this conceit is part of the amusing, rollicking tone. Detailed, soft-focus illustrations in mixed media use an autumnal palette of muted green, peach, and tan that don’t quite match the buoyant flavor of the cheerful text.
This pleasant look at gardening in a city setting reflects a growing trend. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7499-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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