A gentle story that will encourage young readers to think more deeply about the natural world.
An established forest tree mentors a seedling in Cranston’s picture book.
The author drops the reader into an ongoing story (the book is part of her Rooted series) in which the first-person narrator is a mature forest tree, depicted with eyes, eyebrows, a nose, and a mouth. It enjoys interacting with the surrounding fauna and the proximity of human children who come to explore and play (“Being with others gives me a sense of belonging and purpose”). Two frequent visitors are Big Brother and Little Sister, elementary-school-aged kids with dark hair and salmon-hued skin. Their presence draws a nostalgic response as the tree remembers its own younger days. Less endearing are the adults who carve their initials into the tree’s trunk, or the worker in the hardhat who marks the tree for cutting down. With this dire fate hanging over it, the tree serves as mentor to a seedling approaching its “Seed to Tree” coming-of-age ceremony. Cranston alternates text-heavy but straightforward narrative pages with autumnally hued, airbrushed digital illustrations that are more serviceable than truly artistic. Mostly, these pictures present variations on the same scene featuring the tree, the sapling, and ghostly background trees—but the human characters and a changing menagerie of animals do provide sufficient points of difference. The narrator is likeable both in thought and expression, and serves ably to represent the living forest.
A gentle story that will encourage young readers to think more deeply about the natural world.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781966109044
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
While this is a fairly bland treatment compared to Deborah Lee Rose and Carey Armstrong-Ellis’ The Twelve Days of...
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As insubstantial as hot air.
A diverse cast of children first makes a fleet of hot air balloons and then takes to the sky in them.
Lifestyle maven Gaines uses this activity as a platform to celebrate diversity in learning and working styles. Some people like to work together; others prefer a solo process. Some take pains to plan extensively; others know exactly what they want and jump right in. Some apply science; others demonstrate artistic prowess. But “see how beautiful it can be when / our differences share the same sky?” Double-page spreads leading up to this moment of liftoff are laid out such that rhyming abcb quatrains typically contain one or two opposing concepts: “Some of us are teachers / and share what we know. / But all of us are learners. / Together is how we grow!” In the accompanying illustration, a bespectacled, Asian-presenting child at a blackboard lectures the other children on “balloon safety.” Gaines’ text has the ring of sincerity, but the sentiment is hardly an original one, and her verse frequently sacrifices scansion for rhyme. Sometimes it abandons both: “We may not look / or work or think the same, / but we all have an / important part to play.” Swaney’s delicate, pastel-hued illustrations do little to expand on the text, but they are pretty. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11.2-by-18.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at 70.7% of actual size.)
As insubstantial as hot air. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4003-1423-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tommy Nelson
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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