This hilarious, inspirational, and infinitely familiar story about greeting life’s inconveniences with good humor will make...
A child dreams of conquering the world even when clothing proves tricky in this Japanese story translated into English.
It’s bathtime, and the stubborn protagonist insists on getting undressed without any help from Mom. But, as anyone who spends time with young children knows, shirts are notoriously difficult to take off. The young, light-skinned narrator gets stuck in the bright yellow shirt, unable to see, arms hopelessly entangled. The kid becomes quickly resigned to the inevitable, even optimistic: “I was sure lots of important people had been stuck before,” the child muses in front of an imagined, admiring crowd, the pulled-up, inside-out shirt exposing a pink belly. The challenges of being stuck in a shirt are addressed and overcome. “But what if I got thirsty? / I would find a way”: an extra-long straw. The child starts thinking about the friendships that could be formed with other children stuck with their shirts over their heads and dreams of summiting a mountain—“But then I got cold.” The child valiantly tries self-extrication again, hoping that wriggling out of their pants will help (it doesn’t). Mom finally comes to the rescue, hauling our protagonist off to the tub, a few cheeky butt cameos rounding out the humor. Throughout, Yoshitake uses cartoon conventions to great effect, multiple legs indicating frantic scrabbling, motion lines futility and frustration.
This hilarious, inspirational, and infinitely familiar story about greeting life’s inconveniences with good humor will make adults and children alike giggle. (Picture book. 2-7)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2699-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As ephemeral as a valentine.
Daywalt and Jeffers’ wandering crayons explore love.
Each double-page spread offers readers a vision of one of the anthropomorphic crayons on the left along with the statement “Love is [color].” The word love is represented by a small heart in the appropriate color. Opposite, childlike crayon drawings explain how that color represents love. So, readers learn, “love is green. / Because love is helpful.” The accompanying crayon drawing depicts two alligators, one holding a recycling bin and the other tossing a plastic cup into it, offering readers two ways of understanding green. Some statements are thought-provoking: “Love is white. / Because sometimes love is hard to see,” reaches beyond the immediate image of a cat’s yellow eyes, pink nose, and black mouth and whiskers, its white face and body indistinguishable from the paper it’s drawn on, to prompt real questions. “Love is brown. / Because sometimes love stinks,” on the other hand, depicted by a brown bear standing next to a brown, squiggly turd, may provoke giggles but is fundamentally a cheap laugh. Some of the color assignments have a distinctly arbitrary feel: Why is purple associated with the imagination and pink with silliness? Fans of The Day the Crayons Quit (2013) hoping for more clever, metaliterary fun will be disappointed by this rather syrupy read.
As ephemeral as a valentine. (Picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-9268-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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