A warm and funny tale that delivers a simple message about how significant differences can inspire lifelong passions.
A little girl’s record-breaking, ear-splitting voice leads her to a rewarding path in this debut picture book.
Juliet is born “tiny and sweet with 10 wiggly toes on her little brown feet”—and with lungs so powerful that her scream knocks birds out of the trees (eyes bulge, feathers fly) and curls the hair of the alarmed hospital nurses. The sound waves that Juliet generates as she grows up bounce around the solar system with such force that “far, far above Earth, in a ship just arriving, three alien Zorks said, ‘Let’s just keep on driving!’ ” A time-out in the corner, a slip on a slide, even a trip to the store can result in hair-raising screams that stun and alarm. But at age 9, Juliet delights in a new vocal outlet and passion: opera. Now Juliet sings “instead of crying/ and shouting/ and yowling/ and screaming,” and her voice, despite losing no volume, becomes “sweeter with each passing day.” Her proud mother eventually allows Juliet to sing in opera productions: “All over the world from Hong Kong to New Hampshire, / crowds came to see her and to listen in rapture / to a beautiful voice that could reach the back row/ that had started out loud and continued to grow.” Woodson demonstrates an appealing ability to balance humor and heart as she takes Juliet into adulthood and crafts a triumphant conclusion that serves as a gentle lesson for readers about the value of exploring the gifts that make them unique (even if those gifts can, for a time, give parents pause). In this uplifting, comical book’s attractive layout, the simple rhyming text and the illustrations occupy separate pages. The black type pops in a white background with decorative scalloped borders set against a filigreed design rendered in a palette alternating among green, peach, aqua, apricot, rose, red, lavender, gold, and burgundy. In contrast, the well-conceived, full-color illustrations by Lorena S. entertain with cartoon exaggeration (a nurse’s teeth-clenching grimace and the fleeing aliens are especially amusing), and then, with a deft touch, complement the author’s smooth tonal shift as the story eschews slapstick for a sense of celebration and dignity.
A warm and funny tale that delivers a simple message about how significant differences can inspire lifelong passions.Pub Date: March 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4776-5779-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister:...
A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.
Coraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. This is Gaiman’s (American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears—and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. “I will be brave,” thinks Coraline. “No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother; she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own—and every child’s own—reality. As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing.
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97778-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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