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
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent.
Published in magazines, never seen since / Now resurrected for pleasure intense / Versified episodes numbering four / Featuring Marco, and Horton and more!
All of the entries in this follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (2011) involve a certain amount of sharp dealing. Horton carries a Kwuggerbug through crocodile-infested waters and up a steep mountain because “a deal is a deal”—and then is cheated out of his promised share of delicious Beezlenuts. Officer Pat heads off escalating, imagined disasters on Mulberry Street by clubbing a pesky gnat. Marco (originally met on that same Mulberry Street) concocts a baroque excuse for being late to school. In the closer, a smooth-talking Grinch (not the green sort) sells a gullible Hoobub a piece of string. In a lively introduction, uber-fan Charles D. Cohen (The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, 2002) provides publishing histories, places characters and settings in Seussian context, and offers insights into, for instance, the origin of “Grinch.” Along with predictably engaging wordplay—“He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. / But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum”—each tale features bright, crisply reproduced renditions of its original illustrations. Except for “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” which has been jammed into a single spread, the verses and pictures are laid out in spacious, visually appealing ways.
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-38298-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Blume's latest novel begins like many of her personalized, single-problem scenarios, with 15-year-old Davey's father shot to death by robbers at his 7-Eleven store in Atlantic City. Davey can't function for weeks, and it is largely for her that her emotionally and financially stranded mother accepts shelter in Los Alamos with kind Aunt Bitsy and her physicist-husband Walter. Once there, Davey's outsider reactions to Bitsy, Walter, and Los Alamos add dimension to her grief and her recovery. True, we experience no culture shock too strong for Blume's smooth readability; there is nothing subtle about the irony of Bomb City's bland security and weapons designer Waiter's overprotective posture; and Waiter's elitist ugliness is overdone in one violent confrontation with Davey. Also, Davey's chaste but warm relationship with a nice young man she meets in the canyon, plus the coincidence of his father's dying at the hospital where Davey volunteers as a candy-striper, are on the cute romantic level. Nevertheless Davey's lonely struggle to come to terms with the killing, her everyday conflicts with her well-meaning but aggravating aunt and uncle, her impatience with her mother, who finally breaks down and then withdraws from the family, her scorn for the "nerd" physicist Mom dates on her way to recovery, her concern for a high-status but alcoholic school friend, and her assessment of the social structure at the Los Alamos high school—all this takes on a poignancy and a visible edge we wouldn't see had Davey (or Blume) remained in New Jersey.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0385739893
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Bradbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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