A captivating tale that celebrates a beautiful, loving family.
A mixed-race extended family gets together for a tantalizing meal in this debut picture book.
A girl wakes to the smells of food—and the fun it promises—on the morning of family dinner night. The event is a ritual of morning cooking, waiting with her parents for her extended family to arrive, and greeting her grandmother and cousins. The kids, who are presented in a striking spectrum of skin tones, wait patiently for the meal, drawing pictures of one another and dancing to an uncle’s music selections. The table is brightly decorated, and the dishes are as delicious as promised. As she leaves, the grandmother tells the girl, “Our family is love,” and it’s a simple but powerful statement. Cooper’s words have a poetic flow, meant for reading aloud, with an accessible vocabulary that newly independent readers should find approachable. But the lovely, painterly images by debut illustrator Nelson are the stars here, combining realism with abstraction from the first page, in which smells are represented by flowers and vegetables right under the main character’s nose. Even more unusual: readers can customize the girl and her parents and grandmother when they order the book, with its website (lovinglionbooks.com) offering four ethnicities for each character. This feature may create some confusion since the arms shown in the first few pages—meant to represent the immediate family—have a variety of skin tones that will not necessarily match the customized characters appearing later. But this is a minor flaw: the story and pictures convey a potent universal message.
A captivating tale that celebrates a beautiful, loving family.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Loving Lion Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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