To quote one of many exuberant, action-packed spreads: “Enjoy the ride!” (Picture book. 4-8)
Adding to a growing genre, this picture book shouts—no, hollers at the top of its lungs—praise to the codex.
The very title, along with the bold primary colors and enormous (fake) prize medal on the cover, will be an opportunity for young children to gleefully answer the question, “What book are you reading?” The sparse, large-print text begins with a double-page spread that says on the verso, “Take the first step,” and on the recto, “Turn the first page.” The pictures quickly and cleverly move from depicting relatively realistic reading nooks to the places readers go in their imaginations. Both the crazy-quilt pattern of the endpapers and the interior pages are filled with brightly colored, geometric creatures and people actively engaged in activities such as sky diving, enjoying amusement-park rides, trekking across deserts and spelunking. In addition to the gently rhythmic near-rhymes that encourage readers to plunge themselves into books, the other common thread through the kaleidoscope of pulsating scenes is the stylized image of a child (probably a girl), always colored red, always with ponytails, always clutching her book. Although there is a slight calming toward the end, excitement reigns, right up to the gently mind-bending metafictive moment that concludes the book.
To quote one of many exuberant, action-packed spreads: “Enjoy the ride!” (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909263-30-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Flying Eye Books
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
This book offers a fine mirror for brown boys who aspire to write, but it’s also a great pro-literacy story for all children...
A positive tale of how a story can emerge organically from an inkling of an idea to an imaginative literary excursion—even at the hands of preliterate kids.
This story’s young, brown-skinned male protagonist admires his big sister, who loves to read and write “BIG words and (little) words, page after page.” But with just his “swirl after swirl. Squiggle after squiggle,” he thinks he can’t write a story. Like any good writing coach, his sister tells him: “Write what you KNOW.” Using letters and squiggles, he writes about a visit to the ocean, where he and his sister play soccer, see waves, and encounter a shark. His story looks like this: “I o U …. VvVVvv ^.” During show and tell at school, he shares his draft and gets feedback, which helps him finish the story. Lowery’s line drawings and use of frames and speech bubbles common in comics make this a lively story that keeps readers guessing. He paints the protagonist’s story in progress in pale green, bringing the child’s imagination to life. The story’s ending suggests a sequel—or several—that will perhaps illustrate the protagonist’s growth as both reader and writer.
This book offers a fine mirror for brown boys who aspire to write, but it’s also a great pro-literacy story for all children about brown kids who hold reading and writing in high regard. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77138-016-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Plain but pleasingly cadenced, concrete as the list of commodities that makes up much of the text, yet radiating a sense of life's cyclic rhythms, this tells of an early New England farmer going off to Portsmouth market. He sells products the family has raised and grown, sells products they have made from what they raised and grew, then sells the containers (apple barrel, potato bag) the goods were in, and finally sells his ox cart, harness, and ox, before buying some humble household tools and walking home (with "coins still in his pocket") to start again. . . "stitching a new harness for the young ox in the barn." Without Cooney's illustrations—comely and decorous scenes in the manner of early American folk painting—this might seem almost too plain. But she makes a satisfying, full (and eye-filling) experience of the everyday round, as she follows the farmer and his family through the peaceful countryside and the changing seasons—reflecting their unselfconscious accord with nature in her own seamless accord with the text.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1979
ISBN: 978-0-670-53328-2
Page Count: 42
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1979
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