Tots may enjoy flipping the emojis, but most of the scenarios presented miss opportunities to foster emotional literacy.
Youngsters are invited to explore their reactions to a variety of things through photo illustrations and spinning emojis affixed to the book.
A rectangular, die-cut hole appears down the outside of each page of the book to make space for a sturdy plastic pole with three, flat, circular wooden beads threaded through it. Each side of these beads bears a different cartoon facial expression, including happy, sad, angry, surprised, calm, and confused, and young readers can flip them to suit their moods. The project starts off with one wordy paragraph, but most of the text is composed of direct queries and positive affirmations. Between the die-cut rectangles, clear photos of people, animals, and situations appear on sparsely illustrated backgrounds. The children are babies, toddlers, preschoolers, and elementary children of diverse racial presentations along with sundry adults, including a stereotype-defying Black woman dentist. One Asian toddler uses hearing aids, and one of the White children looks to have Down syndrome. Only one double-page spread asks children how they feel about various situations, such as going to school, the dentist, the doctor, and to a birthday party. The rest of the queries ask children how they feel about weather, foods, activities, and animals; they may not generate particularly rich emotional conversations. The project ends with a cluster of children making various expressions and a Mylar mirror embedded in the final page with an invitation to answer the question: “How do you feel today?”
Tots may enjoy flipping the emojis, but most of the scenarios presented miss opportunities to foster emotional literacy. (Novelty board book. 2-4)Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68010-655-8
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Tiger Tales
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Playful and inviting armchair travel for conscientious youngsters.
With shaped pages and a fold-out map, this is a guide to the landmarks of the Big Apple.
Many NYC tourist sights are illustrated, including the expected (the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, and Times Square) and the too-rarely depicted (Chinatown and Harlem’s Apollo Theater), often in paired double-page spreads, with the die-cut page on the recto becoming a different vantage point (or inside) of the tourist attraction on the verso. Cleverly, the rectangular windows of the facade of the main building of the New York Public Library become the spines of shelved books when the page is turned and readers enter. Cosneau’s flat, graphic images in muted, cool colors adeptly capture the busy energy of the city, presenting a diverse cast of people with stylized skin tones of warm gray, chalk white, mustard yellow, and salmon pink. Franceschelli peppers the art with a few brief lines that set the scene: “GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL / People rushing. People running. // Where’s my train? Time to GO!” The first spread is a fold-out map that provides a key to the 10 featured landmarks, though it is not scaled for navigation. It is incorrectly labeled as a map of New York City (Staten Island and the Bronx are nowhere in sight, and Brooklyn and Queens are gray spaces on the margins). The companion title, Hello Paris!, takes young readers across the pond with a similar format and illuminates landmarks in the City of Lights, such as the Louvre, Montmartre, and Notre-Dame. With thinner-than-normal board pages sporting die-cuts, fold-out maps, and spines that could easily give way, both titles are best suited to readers already accustomed to books.
Playful and inviting armchair travel for conscientious youngsters. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2829-7
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Abrams Appleseed
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
An engaging vocabulary booster that repays careful examination.
A tot spends a day with her parents.
Frankie is a little girl in a big world. This oversized board book introduces little readers to that world and, by extension, perhaps to their own. As Frankie explores double-page spreads of her house, backyard, neighborhood, and more, little ones are encouraged to look for specific items, such as the “(friendly) ghost” in the attic and the colored pencils at the grocery store, in each scene. Objects are labeled in small, lowercase serif type while the book’s narrative is delivered in a bold, uppercase, and multicolored sans-serif. The large pages contain a lot of small details, and little ones won’t be able to resist leaning in close to absorb the colorful scenery. Whimsical touches include a masked “bunny bandit” in the backyard and a sneaky kitty who is represented mostly by the parts that peek out. The book works well as a vocabulary expander, but it may well be just as effective in the back seat on long car rides. Purple-haired Frankie is biracial, with a pale-skinned, pink-haired mom and brown-skinned, black-haired dad. Her world is a comfortable, multicultural, suburban one of stand-alone houses and tidy streets.
An engaging vocabulary booster that repays careful examination. (Board book. 2-4)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2824-2
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Abrams Appleseed
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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