Wisdom in a small package.
A child details the family peach tree’s progress, from its sticklike beginnings to its second-year harvest: a single peach.
When the peach-stick’s planted, the youngster’s best friend, Maya, suggests that they plant sticks, too. As the little tree grows roots underground (prodigiously illustrated by Tahboub), more change ensues. The protagonist celebrates a birthday in August, Maya moves in the autumn, and our hero endures a cold, lonely winter. The children write letters—a lovely testimony to nurturing a friendship—and Maya asks about their stick forest. (Tahboub cheekily obliges, providing scribbly, spring-green foliage.) With the arrival of an elder named Ruth the following spring, a mutually welcome bond, liberally sweetened with Ruth’s oatmeal cookies, sprouts between her and the narrator. She describes her childhood cherry tree, which also grew taller than she, maintaining that the tree kept growing while she stopped. Yet she agrees when the child counters, “You grew underneath.” A single flower—“a promise”—appears on the peach tree. In summer, the child shares a peach wedge with Ruth, vowing, “Next year, you get a whole peach.” Imagining the tree after many years, Day’s narrator bestows a final gem: “My tree will be old. But its peaches will always be new.” The child’s different friendships and the tree’s slow maturation yield thematic treasures about growth, change, and aging, anchored by the titular refrain, by turns reflecting sarcasm and genuine pride. Most characters are pale-skinned; Maya is brown-skinned.
Wisdom in a small package. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: May 12, 2026
ISBN: 9780593806296
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Random House Studio
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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
BOOK REVIEW
As insubstantial as hot air.
A diverse cast of children first makes a fleet of hot air balloons and then takes to the sky in them.
Lifestyle maven Gaines uses this activity as a platform to celebrate diversity in learning and working styles. Some people like to work together; others prefer a solo process. Some take pains to plan extensively; others know exactly what they want and jump right in. Some apply science; others demonstrate artistic prowess. But “see how beautiful it can be when / our differences share the same sky?” Double-page spreads leading up to this moment of liftoff are laid out such that rhyming abcb quatrains typically contain one or two opposing concepts: “Some of us are teachers / and share what we know. / But all of us are learners. / Together is how we grow!” In the accompanying illustration, a bespectacled, Asian-presenting child at a blackboard lectures the other children on “balloon safety.” Gaines’ text has the ring of sincerity, but the sentiment is hardly an original one, and her verse frequently sacrifices scansion for rhyme. Sometimes it abandons both: “We may not look / or work or think the same, / but we all have an / important part to play.” Swaney’s delicate, pastel-hued illustrations do little to expand on the text, but they are pretty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.2-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70.7% of actual size.)
As insubstantial as hot air. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4003-1423-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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