Nails its seasonal and counting concepts, with both flair and flaws.
Chernesky and Swan (Pick a Circle, Gather Squares: A Fall Harvest of Shapes, 2013) reunite, again pairing a season with an early learning concept.
This time, a mom and two siblings visit a farm stand on a hot summer day. The boy and girl count their way through Mom’s list, from 1 watermelon to 12 ears of corn. Chernesky’s rhymed couplets are uneven, with spry ones undercut by others that employ tired rhymes or sacrifice kid appeal for rhythm. One sturdy couplet (“1 watermelon so smooth and round. / 2 purple eggplants that weigh two pounds”) is followed by doggerel: “3 bell peppers: orange, green, and yellow / 4 cucumbers. What bumpy fellows!” The lines “9 fine tomatoes are firm and red. / 10 plump plums will keep us well-fed” convey an intrusively persnickety, adult tone, out of step in a child’s narrative. Swan’s digital-and–cut-paper collages elevate the piece, presenting a riotous harvest of brilliant produce against an azure sky and green fields. The light-brown–skinned children (perhaps Latino) exude good spirits, but Swan—an extraordinary colorist, highly skilled at capturing texture by combining painted, cut paper and digital elements—is not at her best depicting humans. The cheerful but banal faces of people are static and cartoonish throughout. But those onions and peaches? Gorgeous.
Nails its seasonal and counting concepts, with both flair and flaws. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1130-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees.
After Duncan finds his crayons gone—yet again—letters arrive, detailing their adventures in friendship.
Eleven crayons send missives from their chosen spots throughout Duncan’s home (and one from his classroom). Red enjoys the thrill of extinguishing “pretend fires” with Duncan’s toy firetruck. White, so often dismissed as invisible, finds a new calling subbing in for the missing queen on the black-and-white chessboard. “Now everyone ALWAYS SEES ME!…(Well, half the time!)” Pink’s living the dream as a pastry chef helming the Breezy Bake Oven, “baking everything from little cupcakes…to…OTHER little cupcakes!” Teal, who’s hitched a ride to school in Duncan’s backpack, meets the crayons in the boy’s desk and writes, “Guess what? I HAVE A TWIN! How come you never told me?” Duncan wants to see his crayons and “meet their new friends.” A culminating dinner party assembles the crayons and their many guests: a table tennis ball, dog biscuits, a well-loved teddy bear, and more. The premise—personified crayons, away and back again—is well-trammeled territory by now, after over a dozen books and spinoffs, and Jeffers once more delivers his signature cartooning and hand-lettering. Though the pages lack the laugh-out-loud sight gags and side-splittingly funny asides of previous outings, readers—especially fans of the crayons’ previous outings—will enjoy checking in on their pals.
Quirky, familiar fun for series devotees. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 3, 2025
ISBN: 9780593622360
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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