by Vroni Hovaguimian ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 24, 2011
A sweet story about teamwork and friendship.
In this debut children’s book, a group of animals lives peacefully in the woods—until a fox shows up and takes over the badger’s house.
“Deep in the woods there are hidden paths known only to the forest dwellers” begins this story set in a world of friendly, fuzzy creatures. The forest dwellers are a wild cat and her kittens, a badger, bear, a doe and her fawns and a bat and a tiny lizard. Together they live in harmony, as each has its own home in the forest, but that tranquility is shattered when Scratchfoot, the badger, returns home from foraging to find that a fox has moved into his burrow. The fox refuses to move, and the rest of the animals try to help Scratchfoot remove the intruder—they make awful noises to try to scare him out and otherwise work together as a team to help their friend. The plot resolves with a lesson about friendship and sharing, although it’s rather quickly wrapped up in a few sentences on the last page. The book itself is the result of teamwork: A grandmother wrote the story, a mother made the colorful animal cutouts, and a 2-and-a-half-year-old child contributed the looping background scribbles. The result is a homegrown approach to illustration, and the resulting abstract, colorful images work well, given the story’s simplicity. Hovaguimian uses a large but not overly complex vocabulary—with words such as “dislodge,” “circumstances” and “foraging”—that helps to make the book a good one for adults to read to children before bed.
A sweet story about teamwork and friendship.Pub Date: May 24, 2011
ISBN: 978-0557703326
Page Count: 30
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Vroni Hovaguimian
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
by Vroni Hovaguimian illustrated by Barbara Liotta
by Susan Count ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Susan Count
BOOK REVIEW
by Susan Count
BOOK REVIEW
by Susan Count
BOOK REVIEW
by Susan Count
by Katie Keridan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 2, 2018
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.