School can be peachy, but that doesn’t mean time away from school isn’t just as valuable, which is the lesson Principal Keene has to learn in this charming story of a school administrator utterly rapt in his job. Mr. Keene just can’t get enough of his fine school with all that fine learning being taught by the fine teachers to the fine students. So he decides to have school on Saturday, then Sunday, then on holidays, then the whole year through: “He was so proud of the students and the teachers, of all the learning they were doing every day.” Literally. But the students and teachers aren’t so sanguine about the situation, though no one wanted to prick Mr. Keene’s balloon. Until Tillie finally tells him that some others are not learning because of all the school, like her dog, who hasn’t learned how to sit, or her little brother, who hasn’t learned how to swing or skip, because she’s never home to teach them. Indeed, she hasn’t learned to climb a tree for all the classroom time she’s been putting in. Mr. Keene sees the light, beveling his enthusiasm and putting his good intentions into perspective. Creech’s text capably moves the story forward, but it has all the humor of a stoat and the repetitions are overmuch. Yet Bliss (Girl of the Shining Mountain, 1999, etc.) comes through not just to save the day, but to make the story memorable, with appealing characters and numerous silly sight gags and verbal asides, like the post-it notes that read “Massive Quiz Saturday” and “Power Nap 2
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-027736-X
Page Count: 32
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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With a little help from his audience, a young storyteller gets over a solid case of writer’s block in this engaging debut.
Despite the (sometimes creatively spelled) examples produced by all his classmates and the teacher’s assertion that “Stories are everywhere!” Ralph can’t get past putting his name at the top of his paper. One day, lying under the desk in despair, he remembers finding an inchworm in the park. That’s all he has, though, until his classmates’ questions—“Did it feel squishy?” “Did your mom let you keep it?” “Did you name it?”—open the floodgates for a rousing yarn featuring an interloping toddler, a broad comic turn and a dramatic rescue. Hanlon illustrates the episode with childlike scenes done in transparent colors, featuring friendly-looking children with big smiles and widely spaced button eyes. The narrative text is printed in standard type, but the children’s dialogue is rendered in hand-lettered printing within speech balloons. The episode is enhanced with a page of elementary writing tips and the tantalizing titles of his many subsequent stories (“When I Ate Too Much Spaghetti,” “The Scariest Hamster,” “When the Librarian Yelled Really Loud at Me,” etc.) on the back endpapers.
An engaging mix of gentle behavior modeling and inventive story ideas that may well provide just the push needed to get some budding young writers off and running. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0761461807
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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Inspired by Colombian librarian Luis Soriano Bohórquez, Brown’s latest tells of a little girl whose wish comes true when a librarian and two book-laden burros visit her remote village.
Ana loves to read and spends all of her free time either reading alone or to her younger brother. She knows every word of the one book she owns. Although she uses her imagination to create fantastical bedtime tales for her brother, she really wants new books to read. Everything changes when a traveling librarian and his two donkeys, Alfa and Beto, arrive in the village. Besides loaning books to the children until his next visit, the unnamed man also reads them stories and teaches the younger children the alphabet. When Ana suggests that someone write a book about the traveling library, he encourages her to complete this task herself. After she reads her library books, Ana writes her own story for the librarian and gives it to him upon his reappearance—and he makes it part of his biblioburro collection. Parra’s colorful folk-style illustrations of acrylics on board bring Ana’s real and imaginary worlds to life. This is a child-centered complement to Jeanette Winter’s Biblioburro (2010), which focuses on Soriano.
The book is perfect for read-alouds, with occasional, often onomatopoeic Spanish words such as “quiquiriquí,” “tacatac” and “iii-aah” adding to the fun. (author’s note, glossary of Spanish terms) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58246-353-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tricycle
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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