A droll tale with a simple message.
A little girl’s neglected belly button takes off on an adventure.
Grace, a cute, quickly sketched girl with tawny skin and a straight black pageboy, excels at getting dirty, but she is also pretty good at getting clean. Most of her body parts get attention in the bath, but not Belly Button. So one day, an unbearably filthy Belly Button decides that she has had enough. She detaches and races out the door! A round figure sporting a haircut like Grace’s and sticks for arms and legs, Belly Button charges into the great unknown. She finds a way to get herself clean but also runs into some unexpected excitement, getting both lost and dirty again. Unsurprisingly, she has a change of heart. Both Belly Button and Grace have a renewed appreciation for each other in the end, but the sly final page reminds readers of yet another unwashed body part….While the story is amusing and the illustrations appealing, the overall experience has little heft. As a reminder to children to wash all their body parts in the bath it works, but without a stronger element of friendship and adventure, it feels a bit thin. Charming depictions of Grace and Belly Button, with their rough outlines and dot eyes, are counterbalanced by a few confusing spreads without enough textual support. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 27% of actual size.)
A droll tale with a simple message. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20284-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A bit predictable but pleasantly illustrated.
Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault’s classic alphabet book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom (1989) gets the Halloween treatment.
Chung follows the original formula to the letter. In alphabetical order, each letter climbs to the top of a tree. They are knocked back to the ground in a jumble before climbing up in sequence again. In homage to the spooky holiday theme, they scale a “creaky old tree,” and a ghostly jump scare causes the pileup. The chunky, colorful art is instantly recognizable. The charmingly costumed letters (“H swings a tail. / I wears a patch. J and K don / bows that don’t match”) are set against a dark backdrop, framed by pages with orange or purple borders. The spreads feature spiderwebs and jack-o’-lanterns. The familiar rhyme cadence is marred by the occasional clunky or awkward phrase; in particular, the adapted refrain of “Chicka chicka tricka treat” offers tongue-twisting fun, but it’s repeatedly followed by the disappointing half-rhyme “Everybody sneaka sneak.” Even this odd construction feels shoehorned into place, since “sneaking” makes little sense when every character in the book is climbing together. The final line of the book ends on a more satisfying note, with “Everybody—time to eat!”
A bit predictable but pleasantly illustrated. (Picture book. 3-7)Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781665954785
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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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