Summer, the youngest child of Mother Earth and Father Time, takes readers along on her playful vacation in this latest addition to this duo’s wonderful series about the seasons. Summer is much too busy jubilantly celebrating all the joys of her life cycle by frolicking at the beach, swimming, building sandcastles, hiking, berry-picking, and camping beneath the coolness of the forest trees, to take heed of her parents’ reminder to tend first to her chores. Only after a frisky splash through the coolness of a waterfall and a gleeful climb up a mountain, does she realize her neglect—viewing the parched, brown earth below. She quickly begins her responsibility of sprinkling the necessary raindrops to quench a thirsty world, making everything bloom and green again. Summer then finishes off her work with the welcome colors of a rainbow, leaving her paints behind for sister Autumn to decorate with her traditional fall colors. Mixed-media acrylic-and-pencil illustrations dominated by brilliant, sunshine yellows burst from the page, beautifully blending with the mirthful, rollicking rhyme. A dazzling completion to an attractive series. (Picture book. 3-5)
Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-84223-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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A pleasing poem that celebrates babies around the world. Whether from a remote village or an urban dwelling, a tent or the snow, Fox notes that each “of these babies, / as everyone knows, / had ten little fingers / and ten little toes.” Repeated in each stanza, the verse establishes an easy rhythm. Oxenbury’s charming illustrations depict infants from a variety of ethnicities wearing clothing that invokes a sense of place. Her pencil drawings, with clean watercolor washes laid in, are sweetly similar to those in her early board books (Clap Hands, 1987, etc.). Each stanza introduces a new pair of babies, and the illustrations cleverly incorporate the children from the previous stanzas onto one page, allowing readers to count not only fingers and toes but also babies. The last stanza switches its focus from two children to one “sweet little child,” and reveals the narrator as that baby’s mother. Little readers will take to the repetition and counting, while parents will be moved by the last spread: a sweet depiction of mother and baby. (Picture book. 3-5)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-206057-2
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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This book wants to be feminist.
Princess Penelope Pineapple, illustrated as a white girl with dark hair and eyes, is the Amelia Bloomer of the Pineapple Kingdom. She has dresses, but she prefers to wear pants as she engages in myriad activities ranging from yoga to gardening, from piloting a plane to hosting a science fair. When it’s time for the Pineapple Ball, she imagines wearing a sparkly pants outfit, but she worries about Grand Lady Busyboots’ disapproval: “ ‘Pants have no place on a lady!’ she’d say. / ‘That’s how it has been, and that’s how it shall stay.’ ” In a moment of seeming dissonance between the text and art, Penny seems to resolve to wear pants, but then she shows up to the ball in a gown. This apparent contradiction is resolved when the family cat, Miss Fussywiggles, falls from the castle into the moat and Princess Penelope saves her—after stripping off her gown to reveal pink, flowered swimming trunks and a matching top. Impressed, Grand Lady Busyboots resolves that princesses can henceforth wear whatever they wish. While seeing a princess as savior rather than damsel in distress may still seem novel, it seems a stretch to cast pants-wearing as a broadly contested contemporary American feminist issue. Guthrie and Oppenheim’s unimaginative, singsong rhyme is matched in subtlety by Byrne’s bright illustrations.
Skip it . (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2603-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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