Provocative, powerful, breathtakingly beautiful.
Responding to the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian artist Shatokhin’s wordless narrative offers a child’s-eye view of military conflict.
The story opens in black and white with a close-up that may be hard to identify at first: a single barbed-wire knot. Things clear up as the view pans to an outline of a child behind the fence, two knots hiding their eyes. The fence transforms into a menacing spider, and the child runs, trips, and falls. When they peer through their fingers, a single yellow butterfly has appeared. There is much for readers to interpret through conversations and multiple readings in these artfully designed pages, some with insets that focus attention, others with objects on facing pages that invite comparison, e.g., a missile and a tree jutting from the ground at similar angles. Several yellow butterflies flit above a bombed-out hole, and the child envisions a playground (past or future?) with happy friends; these images are formed with a minimum of lines against the white background. Shatokhin employs color, scale, perspective, and pattern to great effect in timely—and timeless—scenes that capture the protagonist’s fear, fury, frustration, and, ultimately, hope. Exquisite compositions depict a yellow swarm of butterflies becoming the child’s wings, lifting them to see a blue sky amid the destruction (yellow and blue being the colors of the Ukrainian flag). Useful backmatter includes information on sharing wordless books and discussing war with children. The child and other people portrayed are the white of the page. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Provocative, powerful, breathtakingly beautiful. (Picture book. 5-12)Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63655-064-0
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Red Comet Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
A kind child in a book for middle-grade readers? There’s no downside to that.
Beatrice Zinker is a kinder, gentler Judy Moody.
Beatrice doesn’t want to be fit in a box. Her first word was “WOW,” not “Mom.” She does her best thinking upside down and prefers to dress like a ninja. Like Judy Moody, she has patient parents and a somewhat annoying younger brother. (She also has a perfectly ordinary older sister.) Beatrice spends all summer planning a top-secret spy operation complete with secret codes and a secret language (pig Latin). But on the first day of third grade, her best friend, Lenny (short for Eleanor), shows up in a dress, with a new friend who wants to play veterinarian at recess. Beatrice, essentially a kind if somewhat quirky kid, struggles to see the upside of the situation and ends up with two friends instead of one. Line drawings on almost every spread add to the humor and make the book accessible to readers who might otherwise balk at its 160 pages. Thankfully, the rhymes in the text do not continue past the first chapter. Children will enjoy the frequent puns and Beatrice’s preference for climbing trees and hanging upside down. The story drifts dangerously close to pedantry when Beatrice asks for advice from a grandmotherly neighbor but is saved by likable characters and upside-down cake. Beatrice seems to be white; Lenny’s surname, Santos, suggests that she may be Latina; their school is a diverse one.
A kind child in a book for middle-grade readers? There’s no downside to that. (Fiction. 6-10)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4847-6738-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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