Several bird friends overcome their reluctance to help unfamiliar animals in a colorful but lightly plotted picture book by debut author/illustrator Newton.
Nate, a blue bird with a short, round beak, and his friends Tern Tern, PJ (a pelican) and Gully (who doesn’t appear to be a sea gull) decide to go fishing. But when they arrive at the beach, they discover that their usual place is covered with horseshoe crabs. Nate offers some interesting facts about horseshoe crabs: “April through June, around the full moon, the Horseshoe crabs come out to play.” But when Nate encourages his friends to help the crabs get back to the ocean, the friends reject the idea: The crabs are too creepy looking, they protest. What if they sting? Once again, Nate offers some facts about the crabs: They don’t sting, they’ve been around since the dinosaurs, and they’re useful to humans, who don’t otherwise appear in the book. Still not convinced, the friends won’t help until Nate encourages them to imagine themselves stranded on an island somewhere. The plot ends up with no real conflict or character development, since Nate never has to take a stand against his friends’ prejudice and is able to convince them without much trouble, but the story does offer a lesson in empathy, imagining what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes. Young readers may also pick up enough interesting tidbits about horseshoe crabs to want to investigate the fascinating creatures on their own. With character designs a bit reminiscent of Mo Willems’ Pigeon and Duckling, Newton’s charming, simplistic illustrations might encourage children to attempt their own drawn versions of the bird friends or the rocklike horseshoe crabs. Some of the words are printed in a different color for no apparent reason, and the backgrounds and word balloons are a bit amateurish. Still, young readers will flock toward the bird friends and may not mind that the simple plot is easily resolved.
A facile, fairly conflict-free picture book with charming character design and enough science facts to inspire animal lovers to research further.
Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615820033
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Bookian
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2014
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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Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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