The parents’ certainty that their baby is “the best of all of us” is an affirmation every baby should hear.
In words and pictures, a pair of parents celebrates their little one.
As they did in Little You (2013), Canadian First Nations creators Van Camp (Tlicho Dene) and Flett (Cree-Métis) combine talents for a sweet and loving board book. The parents address their child as a unit, with first-person plural, using cadence and metaphor to convey their feelings. “We sang you from a wish / We sang you from a prayer.” Few very young children will understand the concepts behind that sentiment, but they should understand “We give you kisses to help you grow” without much trouble. Van Camp’s text turns to the reciprocal relationship between parents and child (“As we give you roots you give us wings // And through you we are born again”) as Flett’s crisp, digitally collaged gouache paintings depict, first, a ponytailed parent cuddling the child with one hand while picking berries with the other, then both parents together holding the child at a window as a bird flies by. Both parents are depicted with brown skin and black hair, as is the child; gender is implied visually via hairstyle but never confirmed in the text. Simple visual details also imply the little family’s heritage—striped blankets, baby slings—but do not restrict it.
The parents’ certainty that their baby is “the best of all of us” is an affirmation every baby should hear. (Board book. 3 mos.-2)Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4598-1178-2
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2016
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style.
A summer vacation turns out to be anything but relaxing for Greg and a teeming horde of Heffleys.
Gramma declines the offer of a grand birthday celebration, saying that “what would make her REALLY happy is if everyone else went to Ruttyneck Island”—though she prepares individual packs of her legendary meatballs. (“You knew exactly how much Gramma likes you by how many meatballs you got.”) A gaggle of Heffley relatives and a dog stuff themselves into a small beach house, where overcrowding, personality conflicts, and simmering resentments become just some of the ingredients in a rolling boil of sitcom-style catastrophes, not to mention questionable decisions ranging from leaving the kids to make dinner unsupervised to labeling a cooler “HUMAN ORGANS” to keep random passersby from helping themselves. As usual, Greg supplies the setups in poker-faced journal entries interspersed with black-and-white drawings of slouched figures bearing frowny expressions of dismay or annoyance to cue the laffs. Gramma, it eventually turns out, not only (unsurprisingly) has plans of her own, but is also keeping a shocking secret about those meatballs. To go with the knee-slapping set pieces, Kinney slips in a tasty bit of family lore about how Greg’s parents met, plus droll takes on such low-hanging comedy fruit as restaurant manners, viciously competitive board games, and social media influencers (Greg being one, albeit with zero followers, and his Aunt Veronica’s little dog being another, with 3.8 million).
An entertaining take on family values, Wimpy Kid style. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781419766954
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2024
This delightful debut welcomes readers in like a house filled with love.
A 13-year-old biracial girl longs to build the house of her dreams.
For Lou Bulosan-Nelson, normal is her “gigantic extended family squished into Lola’s for every holiday imaginable.” She shares a bedroom with her Filipina mother, Minda—a former interior-design major and current nurse-to-be—in Lola Celina’s San Francisco home. From her deceased white father, Michael, Lou inherited “not-so-Filipino features,” his love for architecture, and some land. Lou’s quietude implies her keen eye for details, but her passion for creating with her hands resonates loudly. Pining for something to claim as her own, she plans to construct a house from the ground up. When her mom considers moving out of state for a potential job and Lou’s land is at risk of being auctioned off, Lou stays resilient, gathering support from both friends and family to make her dream a reality. Respicio authentically depicts the richness of Philippine culture, incorporating Filipino language, insights into Lou’s family history, and well-crafted descriptions of customs, such as the birdlike Tinikling dance and eating kamayan style (with one’s hands), throughout. Lou’s story gives voice to Filipino youth, addressing cultural differences, the importance of bayanihan (community), and the true meaning of home.
This delightful debut welcomes readers in like a house filled with love. (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1794-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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