An uplifting, eye-filling adventure encouraging children to realize their innate creativity and individuality.
Faced with a blank canvas, a young girl finds her creative spirit in Brehm’s unusual picture book.
Emerging from a dark forest, a sickle moon overhead, a young girl enters “a whispery house / At the edge of the wild,” where mysterious “Old Master Paint” awaits her in a cape of luminous, swirling colors. Too tongue-tied and uncertain to say her name, the girl is given a bucket and a brush and led down strange hallways and upstairs to a room dominated by an enormous, white canvas—hers to paint, she is told. After a tentative, disappointing first effort, the little girl’s anger and self-doubt—in the form of trolls, wolves, and her alter ego—threaten to get the better of her until she realizes that she is in control. It is her own life the girl is painting, and she can choose to “Dream large! Grab on! / You’re just getting started, / Such adventures to come!” The offbeat cadence of inspirational, rhyming, and almost-rhyming text winds through dreamlike images by award-winning Brazilian author/illustrator Coelho. Shadowed rooms (odd angles and haunting details), rich abstractions of patterns and color, and showers of light reflect the little girl’s initial hesitation to claim her place in the world and her subsequent, celebratory sense of self-discovery.
An uplifting, eye-filling adventure encouraging children to realize their innate creativity and individuality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64999-718-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: BeeZeus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
Only for dedicated fans of the series.
When a kid gets the part of the ninja master in the school play, it finally seems to be the right time to tackle the closet monster.
“I spot my monster right away. / He’s practicing his ROAR. / He almost scares me half to death, / but I won’t be scared anymore!” The monster is a large, fluffy poison-green beast with blue hands and feet and face and a fluffy blue-and-green–striped tail. The kid employs a “bag of tricks” to try to catch the monster: in it are a giant wind-up shark, two cans of silly string, and an elaborate cage-and-robot trap. This last works, but with an unexpected result: the monster looks sad. Turns out he was only scaring the boy to wake him up so they could be friends. The monster greets the boy in the usual monster way: he “rips a massive FART!!” that smells like strawberries and lime, and then they go to the monster’s house to meet his parents and play. The final two spreads show the duo getting ready for bed, which is a rather anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a rambunctious tale. Elkerton’s bright illustrations have a TV-cartoon aesthetic, and his playful beast is never scary. The narrator is depicted with black eyes and hair and pale skin. Wallace’s limping verses are uninspired at best, and the scansion and meter are frequently off.
Only for dedicated fans of the series. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-4894-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet, if oft-told, story.
A plush toy rabbit bonds with a boy and watches him grow into adulthood.
The boy receives the blue bunny for his birthday and immediately becomes attached to it. Unbeknownst to him, the ungendered bunny is sentient; it engages in dialogue with fellow toys, giving readers insight into its thoughts. The bunny's goal is to have grand adventures when the boy grows up and no longer needs its company. The boy spends many years playing imaginatively with the bunny, holding it close during both joyous and sorrowful times and taking it along on family trips. As a young man, he marries, starts a family, and hands over the beloved toy to his toddler-aged child in a crib. The bunny's epiphany—that he does not need to wait for great adventures since all his dreams have already come true in the boy's company—is explicitly stated in the lengthy text, which is in many ways similar to The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). The illustrations, which look hand-painted but were digitally created, are moderately sentimental with an impressionistic dreaminess (one illustration even includes a bunny-shaped cloud in the sky) and a warm glow throughout. The depiction of a teenage male openly displaying his emotions—hugging his beloved childhood toy for example—is refreshing. All human characters present as White expect for one of the boy’s friends who is Black.
A sweet, if oft-told, story. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72825-448-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
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