This collection of poems celebrates Alaska’s spring and summer seasons, when daylight lasts 24 hours, and when the usually white landscape is transformed into an abundance of flora. Carlstrom (Raven and River, 1997, etc.) has composed brief, direct poems in which the sun, trees, rivers, and animals sing, pray, question, warn, and wonder at a world released from snow and ice. The verses often make effective use of two voices or a repeated refrain, e.g., in the evocative “Song of the Aspen Aunties,” the trees shake their leaves throughout the long evening of midnight sun: “Whispering/Whispering/All night long./Where is the darkness?/ Where has it gone?/ Why does the day/Go on and on?” Most poems are presented in double-page spreads with Kuroi’s haunting paintings; they occasionally become sentimentally soft and fuzzy, but more often lyrically conjure a sunny Alaskan landscape. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: May 18, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-22746-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As in Gorilla, Chinchilla (1990), some rather inane verse (``The hen in a bucket/Watches her chick,/Who's learning to balance—/A difficult trick'') serves to caption some odd pairings, in this case of animals and their containers. Kitchen's art is still wonderfully detailed and appealing, but there's nothing very clever here in either the choice of subjects or their treatment. For admirers of Kitchens's splendid Animal Alphabet (1984), a disappointment. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8037-0943-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
Again, Locker has skillfully painted a series of landscapes in the manner of the Hudson River masters, then added some wooden figures plus a contrived story reflecting a social conscience: in this case, a lightly fictionalized account of white men stealing land from Indians who knew how to value it as they found it. Characters are introduced but not developed. The Indians go to a reservation, the interlopers build farms; then the book dwindles away with the partial return of the wilderness. Not actively bad, but lifeless and annoyingly pretentious. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8037-0936-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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