A young girl named Cecilia describes her affection and relationship with her cat, Gorilla, in short snappy poems.
There are 19 in all, each one titled to set the scene for Gorilla’s many roles: feline nurse, wry boxer, phone-pouncer, paint-tracker, pin-the-tail target, bedmate, soul-food gourmand, tear-licker (when Cecilia’s best friend moves away), fly-chaser, guard cat—and ending with Cecilia proudly announcing, “I’m Gorilla’s human. Don’t ever forget!” Broadly shaped images in Alkyd paints, set against white backgrounds, spill over the pages and rely on their size rather than detailed bodies to define the drama of everyday events. Gorilla is gray and green-eyed, and Cecilia is brown-skinned with dreadlocks. Cat lovers will identify with all the feline traits and tricks, and the cat-girl sentiments are precisely on target.
A great cover—a close-up of green-eyed, gray Gorilla’s head with tongue licking her chops—is sure to entice cat lovers everywhere. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-439-31770-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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Former Poet Laureate Herrera encourages his young readers to imagine all they might be in his new picture book.
Herrera’s free verse tells his own story, starting as a young boy who loves the plants and animals he finds outdoors in the California fields and is then thrust into the barren, concrete city. In the city he begins to learn to read and write, learning English and discovering a love for words and the way ink flows “like tiny rivers” across the page as he applies pen to paper. Words soon become sentences, poems, lyrics, and a means of escape. This love of the word ultimately leads him to make writing his vocation and to become the first Chicano Poet Laureate of the United States, an honor Herrera received in 2015. Through this story of hardship to success, expressed in a series of conditional statements that all begin “If I,” Herrera implores his readers to “imagine what you could do.” Castillo’s ink and foam monoprint illustrations are a tender accompaniment to Herrera’s verse, the black lines of her illustrations flowing across the page in rhythm with the author’s poetry. Together this makes for a charming read-aloud for groups or a child snuggled in a lap.
A lyrical coming-of-age story in picture-book form that begs to be shared. (Picture book/memoir. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9052-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY | CHILDREN'S BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A linguistic and visual feast awaits in Alexander and Sweet’s debut collaboration.
If the mechanics of deciphering words on a page is a well-covered topic, the orchestration of finding magic between pages is an art emphasized but unexplained…until now. First things are first: “find a tree—a black tupelo or dawn redwood will do—and plant yourself.” Once settled, take the book in hand and “dig your thumb at the bottom of each juicy section and pop the words out…[then] // Squeeze every morsel of each plump line until the last drop of magic / drips from the infinite sky.” Reading, captured here in both content and form, is hailed as the unassailably individual, creative act it is. The prosody and rhythm and multimodal sensuousness of Alexander’s poetic text is made playfully material in Sweet’s mixed-media collage-and-watercolor illustrations. Not only does the book explain how to read, but it also demonstrates the elegant and emotive chaos awaiting readers in an intricate partnership of text and image. Despite the engaging physicality of gatefolds and almost three-dimensional spreads, readers with lower contrast sensitivity or readers less experienced at differentiating shapes and letters may initially find some of the more complex collage spreads difficult to parse. Children depicted are typically kraft-paper brown.
New readers will be eager to follow such unconventional instructions, and experienced readers will recognize every single step . (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-230781-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S POETRY
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