Welcome insights from a celebrated author.
Translated questions from kids, answered by renowned Italian children’s writer Rodari in his 1950s newspaper columns.
Rodari, who grew up during Mussolini’s reign, briefly joined the Fascists to obtain work but actively resisted the regime. His ethos shines through in this work; respect for his child audience mingles with his pro-labor, anti-authoritarian outlook. He often appends mini-parables and rhyming ditties to his answers. Throughout, Rodari excoriates proverbs for their fusty, contradictory didacticism. Responding to “Why do we have to study?” he notes that learning helps students make the world “a better and more beautiful place”—yet he urges children to seek lessons beyond books, in firsthand experiences. His brilliant riposte to why gold is so precious locates its answer in the human labor expended to extract it. He then skewers the proverb “Silence is golden,” avowing that if “it’s the right time to express your point of view, then silence isn’t even worth as much as…sawdust.” Rodari provides pithy answers to basic queries about rainbows, light bulbs, and auto engines. There are koanlike nuggets for some “whys,” from “Why are kings kings?” (“because they say so”) to “Why does it rain? (“because of the sun”) to “Why do we all wish for things?” (“wishing…amounts to living”). His riff on the secret to lifelong happiness is lovely and affirmative: “You learn it from life.” Depicting diverse children and adults, Yoon’s whimsical illustrations further enliven the text.
Welcome insights from a celebrated author. (introduction from Shugaar, artist’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-12)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781592703647
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Preposterous situations and farcical sound-alike sentences will elicit groans and giggles.
Homophones in versatile parallel sentences create absurd scenarios.
The pattern is simple but endlessly funny: Two sentences, each illustrated, sound the same but are differentiated by their use of homophones. On the verso of the opening spread a cartoon restaurant scene shows a diner lifting a plate of spaghetti and meatballs to a waiter who removes a dark hair from the plate of noodles: “The hair came forth.” (Both figures have brown skin.) Opposite, the scene shows a race with a tortoise at the finish line while a hare trails the tortoise, a snake, and a snail: “The hare came fourth.” The humorous line drawings feature an array of humans, animals, and monsters and provide support and context to the sentences, however bizarre they may seem. New vocabulary is constantly introduced, as is the idea that spelling and punctuation can alter meaning. Some pairings get quite sophisticated; others are rather forced. “The barred man looted the establishment. / The bard man luted the establishment” stretches the concept, paralleling barred with bard as adjectives and looted with luted as verbs. The former is an orange-jumpsuited White prisoner in a cell; the other, a brown-skinned musician strumming a lute for a racially diverse group of dancers. Poetic license may allow for luted, though the word lute is glaringly missing from the detailed glossary.
Preposterous situations and farcical sound-alike sentences will elicit groans and giggles. (Informational picture book. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-72820-659-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts.
From a Caldecott and Sibert honoree, an invitation to take a mind-expanding journey from the surface of our planet to the furthest reaches of the observable cosmos.
Though Chin’s assumption that we are even capable of understanding the scope of the universe is quixotic at best, he does effectively lead viewers on a journey that captures a sense of its scale. Following the model of Kees Boeke’s classic Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps (1957), he starts with four 8-year-old sky watchers of average height (and different racial presentations). They peer into a telescope and then are comically startled by the sudden arrival of an ostrich that is twice as tall…and then a giraffe that is over twice as tall as that…and going onward and upward, with ellipses at each page turn connecting the stages, past our atmosphere and solar system to the cosmic web of galactic superclusters. As he goes, precisely drawn earthly figures and features in the expansive illustrations give way to ever smaller celestial bodies and finally to glimmering swirls of distant lights against gulfs of deep black before ultimately returning to his starting place. A closing recap adds smaller images and additional details. Accompanying the spare narrative, valuable side notes supply specific lengths or distances and define their units of measure, accurately explain astronomical phenomena, and close with the provocative observation that “the observable universe is centered on us, but we are not in the center of the entire universe.”
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts. (afterword, websites, further reading) (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4623-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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