Art meets astronomy in this visually dazzling book.
Author/illustrator Davis’ picture book tells a tale of a celestial dreamer and an artist.
Vincent is a pale-skinned little boy with red hair, dressed for adventure. In his dream, he finds himself in a new place that’s a red, dusty desert, surrounded by cliffs and rocks; he also notices that his weight feels different, and he can jump very high. Vincent paints his unique surroundings, including a cerulean sunset above an empty crater. When night falls, he looks for Earth’s moon, but all he sees among the stars are two tiny soft lights—Phobos and Deimos, the little moons of Mars. The next day, Vincent imagines Mars’ craters filled with water, and he paints a placid lake surrounded by marble mountains, a lush green garden in a crater, and fossils of flowers in an ancient rock. Davis’ full-color, painterly illustrations are truly stunning (reminiscent of Vincent Van Gogh’s work, of course), with swirling skies and softly hemispherical detail; visible brush strokes add dimension and nuance. The rhyming verse has a dreamlike quality (“the sky looked rusty, / but very profound”) and appears on every second page, so the text doesn’t interrupt the images. The book includes educational details about the red planet, including the size of its two moons.
Art meets astronomy in this visually dazzling book.Pub Date: March 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798990350809
Page Count: 35
Publisher: Artists on Planets
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift.
A paean to teachers and their surrogates everywhere.
This gentle ode to a teacher’s skill at inspiring, encouraging, and being a role model is spoken, presumably, from a child’s viewpoint. However, the voice could equally be that of an adult, because who can’t look back upon teachers or other early mentors who gave of themselves and offered their pupils so much? Indeed, some of the self-aware, self-assured expressions herein seem perhaps more realistic as uttered from one who’s already grown. Alternatively, readers won’t fail to note that this small book, illustrated with gentle soy-ink drawings and featuring an adult-child bear duo engaged in various sedentary and lively pursuits, could just as easily be about human parent- (or grandparent-) child pairs: some of the softly colored illustrations depict scenarios that are more likely to occur within a home and/or other family-oriented setting. Makes sense: aren’t parents and other close family members children’s first teachers? This duality suggests that the book might be best shared one-on-one between a nostalgic adult and a child who’s developed some self-confidence, having learned a thing or two from a parent, grandparent, older relative, or classroom instructor.
A sweet, soft conversation starter and a charming gift. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943200-08-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Compendium
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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
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