COCO GETS HER FIRST COMPUTER (COCO'S LIFE ADVENTURES BOOKS)

Name: COCO GETS HER FIRST COMPUTER (COCO'S LIFE ADVENTURES BOOKS)
Author: Shon Shree Lewis
ISBN: 979-8447193164

by Shon Shree Lewis ; illustrated by C. Lola ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2022

A lively but uneven computer tale.

bookshelf

A young girl gets a computer to help her develop math skills in this fourth installment of a picture-book series.

Coco, an early elementary schooler with warm brown skin and black hair, loves toys that light up but dislikes math. The size of coins versus their values confuses her. When she gets an assignment wrong at school, she’s unhappy. She wants a cash register so she can count money like a worker at a drive-through. Instead, her parents get her a computer. Now, she can practice math using a tutorial to help her learn. Lewis’ accessible story starring an appealing hero features short, direct sentences, with only a few challenging vocabulary words for emergent readers (calculate, cashier). Lola’s digital cartoon illustrations are repetitive, frequently using the same facial expressions and postures. And when Coco smiles to show her teeth in the simple, flat drawings, the otherwise cheerful girl sports a creepy expression. An aside in which Coco tells her dog, Chico, she will pray for a computer “the same way she prayed for Chico the previous Christmas” seems to conflate religious faith with materialistic wishes. Still, this energetic story is likely to please fans of Coco’s adventures.

A lively but uneven computer tale.

Pub Date: April 16, 2022

ISBN: 979-8447193164

Page Count: 38

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2023

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S

- BOOK REVIEW
COCO'S COURAGE
by Shon Shree Lewis ; illustrated by Viona Betzy and C. Lola

bookshelf

ON THE FIRST DAY OF KINDERGARTEN

by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Laura Hughes ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 21, 2016

While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...

bookshelf

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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES

- BOOK REVIEW
A PERFECT PLACE TO PLAY
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Jim Valeri

- BOOK REVIEW
ON THE FIRST DAY OF FIRST GRADE
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Sarah Jennings

- BOOK REVIEW
FIVE LITTLE BUNNIES
by Tish Rabe ; illustrated by Dan Yaccarino

bookshelf

LOVE FROM THE CRAYONS

by Drew Daywalt ; illustrated by Oliver Jeffers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2019

As ephemeral as a valentine.

bookshelf

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)