An enthusiastic invitation for kids to celebrate their animal friends through poetry composition.
A set of children’s poems that versifies about pets while teaching creative writing.
Vardell and Wong (The Poetry Friday Anthology for Celebrations, 2015, etc.) use animals as centerpieces for this addition to the Poetry Friday Anthology educational series for young readers. There are 12 clusters of poems and activities, and each explores a different poetic concept, such as rhyming, acrostics, rebuses, or found poetry. A simple illustration or puzzle exercise at the start of each section introduces the idea at hand, and the three poems that follow use the concept to build upon one another. Together, they tell a brief story about pets while also exhibiting their lesson. A short prompt at the end of each section gives readers a chance to try writing similar poems themselves. The book is entirely playful in tone—most poems end in jokes—and it encourages students to find their own approach to writing even as the pet theme remains constant. The back of the book contains recommendations for more pet poems that readers can turn into new stories. There are also a handful of exercises that focus on reading comprehension and other nuts-and-bolts writing skills, such as punctuation or capitalization. These are separated out so that each cluster may also be used as a practical, stand-alone minilesson. The fact that the poems use varying rhyme schemes could potentially cause confusion for students writing their own poetry. For example, there’s the in-line rhyme of “Loose tooth, whose tooth? / Boar’s tooth, your tooth,” whose half-rhymes become more awkward to parse when read aloud. Still, the collection has enough nonrhyming exercises that such complexity doesn’t hold it back too much.
An enthusiastic invitation for kids to celebrate their animal friends through poetry composition.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-937057-71-8
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Pamelo Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Broccoli: No way is James going to eat broccoli. “It’s disgusting,” says James. Well then, James, says his father, let’s consider the alternatives: some wormy dirt, perhaps, some stinky socks, some pre-chewed gum? James reconsiders the broccoli, but—milk? “Blech,” says James. Right, says his father, who needs strong bones? You’ll be great at hide-and-seek, though not so great at baseball and kickball and even tickling the dog’s belly. James takes a mouthful. So it goes through lumpy oatmeal, mushroom lasagna and slimy eggs, with James’ father parrying his son’s every picky thrust. And it is fun, because the father’s retorts are so outlandish: the lasagna-making troll in the basement who will be sent back to the rat circus, there to endure the rodent’s vicious bites; the uneaten oatmeal that will grow and grow and probably devour the dog that the boy won’t be able to tickle any longer since his bones are so rubbery. Schneider’s watercolors catch the mood of gentle ribbing, the looks of bewilderment and surrender and the deadpanned malarkey. It all makes James’ father’s last urging—“I was just going to say that you might like them if you tried them”—wholly fresh and unexpected advice. (Early reader. 5-9)
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-14956-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.
In Florence’s middle-grade fantasy novel, a young girl’s heart is tested in the face of an evil, spreading Darkness.
Eleven-year-old Lydia, “freckle-cheeked and round-eyed, with hair the color of pine bark and fair skin,” is struggling with the knowledge that she has reached the age to apprentice as an herbalist. Lydia is reluctant to leave her beloved, magical Mulberry Glen and her cozy Housetree in the woods—she’ll miss Garder, the Glen’s respected philosopher; her fairy guardian Pit; her human friend Livy; and even the mischievous part-elf, part-imp, part-human twins Zale and Zamilla. But the twins go missing after hearing of a soul-sapping Darkness that has swallowed a forest and is creeping into minds and engulfing entire towns. They have secretly left to find a rare fruit that, it is said, will stop the Darkness if thrown into the heart of the mountain that rises out of the lethal forest. Lydia follows, determined to find the twins before they, too, fall victim to the Darkness. During her journey, accompanied by new friends, she gradually realizes that she herself has a dangerous role to play in the quest to stop the Darkness. In this well-crafted fantasy, Florence skillfully equates the physical manifestation of Darkness with the feelings of insecurity and powerlessness that Lydia first struggles with when thinking of leaving the Glen. Such negative thoughts grow more intrusive the closer she and her friends come to the Darkness—and to Lydia’s ultimate, powerfully rendered test of character, which leads to a satisfyingly realistic, not quite happily-ever-after ending. Highlights include a delightfully haunting, reality-shifting library and a deft sprinkling of Latin throughout the text; Pit’s pet name for Lydia is mea flosculus (“my little flower”). Fine-lined ink drawings introducing each chapter add a pleasing visual element to this well-grounded fairy tale.
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781956393095
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Waxwing Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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