This unusual if culturally hegemonic Christmas story will appeal to kids interested in ninjas and samurais and, of course,...
A mischievous little ninja scares Santa away and then receives an unexpected gift in the form of a huge snowball fight.
The young ninja, Yukio, wants to stage a snowball battle on Christmas Eve, but all the other ninjas are staying home and behaving so they will receive their presents from Santa. Yukio doesn’t care about presents, so he uses ninja tactics to sneak up on Santa and startle him by ringing a huge, noisy gong and rallying the other ninjas to scare away the intruder. When a mysterious samurai arrives with an army of snowmen, all the little ninjas do battle with the snowmen in an “epic snowball fight,” just as Yukio had wanted, though the samurai disappears. On Christmas morning Yukio is worried that he has ruined Christmas for all the other ninjas, but everyone gets Christmas gifts from Santa. Yukio receives a snowman’s hat and carrot nose and a letter from Samurai Santa indicating that the snowman battle was his special gift. Computer-generated illustrations use a limited palette of black, red, white, and soft gray, with the text set in a casual, modern typeface. A large format with landscape orientation provides plenty of room for the ninja-snowman battle scenes and the resolution on Christmas morning. The text never addresses the question of how these feudal Japanese assassins came to believe in Santa in the first place.
This unusual if culturally hegemonic Christmas story will appeal to kids interested in ninjas and samurais and, of course, to any kids who like an epic snowball fight. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3057-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among
Pete, the cat who couldn’t care less, celebrates Christmas with his inimitable lassitude.
If it weren’t part of the title and repeated on every other page, readers unfamiliar with Pete’s shtick might have a hard time arriving at “groovy” to describe his Christmas celebration, as the expressionless cat displays not a hint of groove in Dean’s now-trademark illustrations. Nor does Pete have a great sense of scansion: “On the first day of Christmas, / Pete gave to me… / A road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” The cat is shown at the wheel of a yellow microbus strung with garland and lights and with a star-topped tree tied to its roof. On the second day of Christmas Pete gives “me” (here depicted as a gray squirrel who gets on the bus) “2 fuzzy gloves, and a road trip to the sea. / GROOVY!” On the third day, he gives “me” (now a white cat who joins Pete and the squirrel) “3 yummy cupcakes,” etc. The “me” mentioned in the lyrics changes from day to day and gift to gift, with “4 far-out surfboards” (a frog), “5 onion rings” (crocodile), and “6 skateboards rolling” (a yellow bird that shares its skateboards with the white cat, the squirrel, the frog, and the crocodile while Pete drives on). Gifts and animals pile on until the microbus finally arrives at the seaside and readers are told yet again that it’s all “GROOVY!”
Pete’s fans might find it groovy; anyone else has plenty of other “12 Days of Christmas” variants to choose among . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-267527-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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