An uplifting heart melter without any treacle.
Sign language brings a neighborhood together.
Bunny stuffie in hand, pale-skinned young Sam is a fond fixture in her racially diverse, middle-class community. She knows her neighbors’ passions (basketball, biking, baking), but she has a hard time communicating with them: Sam is deaf, and they don’t know sign language. (Critical here: It’s not Sam’s deafness that’s the problem; it’s a communal one.) One winter, Sam notices her neighbors gathering regularly at the house next door, where, as she sees through a window, “a man with a ponytail [stands] at the front of the room” and her neighbors sit in chairs before him. Time goes by, and one day Sam finds, to her delight, that her neighbors are signing at her (“How are you?” “I like your red shoes,” and so on). It turns out that the ponytailed man was teaching them to sign. Based on a true story (there’s an adorable photo of the real Sam at the back of the book), this spirit-boosting offering highlights an unexpected perk for the neighbors who learned to sign: It unites these folks, who, until then, “didn’t always have the time to get to know one another,” as the omniscient narrator diplomatically puts it. Chen’s anodyne art, which captures the neighborhood’s manicured suburban tidiness, gracefully incorporates ribbonlike swoops and rings of color when characters are signing (an index lists and describes each sign).
An uplifting heart melter without any treacle. (author’s note) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780063057067
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2026
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet and endearing feathered migration.
A relationship between a Latina grandmother and her mixed-race granddaughter serves as the frame to depict the ruby-throated hummingbird migration pattern.
In Granny’s lap, a girl is encouraged to “keep still” as the intergenerational pair awaits the ruby-throated hummingbirds with bowls of water in their hands. But like the granddaughter, the tz’unun—“the word for hummingbird in several [Latin American] languages”—must soon fly north. Over the next several double-page spreads, readers follow the ruby-throated hummingbird’s migration pattern from Central America and Mexico through the United States all the way to Canada. Davies metaphorically reunites the granddaughter and grandmother when “a visitor from Granny’s garden” crosses paths with the girl in New York City. Ray provides delicately hashed lines in the illustrations that bring the hummingbirds’ erratic flight pattern to life as they travel north. The watercolor palette is injected with vibrancy by the addition of gold ink, mirroring the hummingbirds’ flashing feathers in the slants of light. The story is supplemented by notes on different pages with facts about the birds such as their nest size, diet, and flight schedule. In addition, a note about ruby-throated hummingbirds supplies readers with detailed information on how ornithologists study and keep track of these birds.
A sweet and endearing feathered migration. (bibliography, index) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0538-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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