Bed-based procrastination is nothing new, but Livi’s imaginative play takes the experience to an entirely superior level.
The exuberant heroine of On My Way to the Bath (2012) returns to tackle that most perilous of childhood rituals: bedtime.
Making bedtime avoidance and delay into a high art, Livi calls upon a number of strategies when her mother informs her that it is time for bed. Assuring readers that she isn’t even remotely sleepy (“Bed is for tired people,” she is quick to point out), she finds creative ways to slow the bedtime process down to a crawl. Suddenly, she’s a tightrope walker, a rocket scientist or even an octopus as the situation demands. When, at long last, an understandably frazzled mom gets her offspring under the sheets, Livi sleeps like an angel. So well, in fact, that her response to her mother’s gentle wake-up call the next morning is to become a hibernating bear. Honestly funny from start to finish, the madcap digital art isn’t afraid to, at times, relinquish the goofy for a truly lovely spread, as with the opening and closing endpapers. Livi achieves precocity without even a hint of saccharine. It’s hard to resist her final wail—“I don’t want to miss anything!”—which reveals what’s really been going on here.
Bed-based procrastination is nothing new, but Livi’s imaginative play takes the experience to an entirely superior level. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-80272-366-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
Teachers looking for a new way to start off the school year will eat this one up.
In Murray’s children’s debut, when a gingerbread man made by schoolchildren gets left behind at recess, he decides he has to find his class: “I’ll run and I’ll run, / As fast as I can. / I can catch them! I’m their / Gingerbread Man!”
And so begins his rollicking rhyming adventure as he runs, limps, slides and skips his way through the school, guided on his way by the friendly teachers he meets. Flattened by a volleyball near the gym, he gets his broken toe fixed by the kindly nurse and then slides down the railing into the art teacher’s lunch. Then it’s off to the principal’s office, where he takes a spin in her chair before she arrives. “The children you mentioned just left you to cool. / They’re hanging these posters of you through the school.” The principal takes him back to the classroom, where the children all welcome him back. The book’s comic-book layout suits the elementary-school tour that this is, while Lowery’s cartoon artwork fits the folktale theme. Created with pencil, screen printing and digital color, the simple illustrations give preschoolers a taste of what school will be like. While the Gingerbread Man is wonderfully expressive, though, the rather cookie-cutter teachers could use a little more life.
Teachers looking for a new way to start off the school year will eat this one up. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25052-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Clever verse coupled with bold primary-colored images is sure to attract and hone the attention of fun-seeking children...
A fizzy yet revealing romp through the toy world.
Though of standard picture-book size, Stein and illustrator Staake’s latest collaboration (Bugs Galore, 2012, etc.) presents a sweeping compendium of diversions for the young. From fairies and gnomes, race cars and jacks, tin cans and socks, to pots ’n’ pans and a cardboard box, Stein combs the toy kingdom for equally thrilling sources of fun. These light, tightly rhymed quatrains focus nicely on the functions characterizing various objects, such as “Floaty, bubbly, / while-you-wash toys” or “Sharing-secrets- / with-tin-cans toys,” rather than flatly stating their names. Such ambiguity at once offers Staake free artistic rein to depict copious items capable of performing those tasks and provides pre-readers ample freedom to draw from the experiences of their own toy chests as they scan Staake’s vibrant spreads brimming with chunky, digitally rendered objects and children at play. The sense of community and sharing suggested by most of the spreads contributes well to Stein’s ultimate theme, which he frames by asking: “But which toy is / the best toy ever? / The one most fun? / Most cool and clever?” Faced with three concluding pages filled with all sorts of indoor and outside toys to choose from, youngsters may be shocked to learn, on turning to the final spread, that the greatest one of all—“a toy SENSATION!”—proves to be “[y]our very own / imagination.”
Clever verse coupled with bold primary-colored images is sure to attract and hone the attention of fun-seeking children everywhere. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6254-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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