Warm and dreamy, this sweet story captures the joy of finding your pack.
A lone wolf finds comfort in a new friendship.
“Every night at midnight I turn into a wolf,” the young, brown-skinned narrator reveals. The affliction is mostly welcome. With nimble paws and a magnificent tail, this werewolf runs by moonlight, independent and speedy. Still, secretly turning into a wolf every night makes it difficult to maintain friendships and attend sleepovers. “There is no one else like me,” the child reports, at once reveling in the transformation and acknowledging how it has resulted in loneliness. Then a new girl arrives at school. With a long mane of white hair and a wolf pendant around her neck, the tan-skinned girl seems to make friends easily. In the class’s weekly race, she even beats the narrator, who usually wins. That night, the protagonist is joined by a white wolf wearing a familiar pendant. Together, they fly across the rooftops, smiles on their adorable wolf faces…until a misstep leaves the white wolf tumbling to the ground with an injured paw and eventually leads to the protagonist feeling less alone. Cheong’s approachable prose and charming illustrations deliver a heartfelt story about the comfort of community. Human characters are diverse in skin tone and body type. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Warm and dreamy, this sweet story captures the joy of finding your pack. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781665917384
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.
The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race; two students even sport glasses. The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools.
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of Kindergarten (2003), it basically gets the job done. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234834-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As insubstantial as hot air.
A diverse cast of children first makes a fleet of hot air balloons and then takes to the sky in them.
Lifestyle maven Gaines uses this activity as a platform to celebrate diversity in learning and working styles. Some people like to work together; others prefer a solo process. Some take pains to plan extensively; others know exactly what they want and jump right in. Some apply science; others demonstrate artistic prowess. But “see how beautiful it can be when / our differences share the same sky?” Double-page spreads leading up to this moment of liftoff are laid out such that rhyming abcb quatrains typically contain one or two opposing concepts: “Some of us are teachers / and share what we know. / But all of us are learners. / Together is how we grow!” In the accompanying illustration, a bespectacled, Asian-presenting child at a blackboard lectures the other children on “balloon safety.” Gaines’ text has the ring of sincerity, but the sentiment is hardly an original one, and her verse frequently sacrifices scansion for rhyme. Sometimes it abandons both: “We may not look / or work or think the same, / but we all have an / important part to play.” Swaney’s delicate, pastel-hued illustrations do little to expand on the text, but they are pretty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.2-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70.7% of actual size.)
As insubstantial as hot air. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4003-1423-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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