And careful observers will note that the underwear’s expression also changes, adding a bit more creep to the tale. Brown’s illustrations keep the backgrounds and details simple so readers focus on Jasper’s every emotion, writ large on his expressive face.
It’s only when Jasper finally admits to himself that maybe he’s not such a big rabbit after all that he thinks of a clever solution to his fear of the dark.
In the morning, though, he’s wearing green! He goes to increasing lengths to get rid of the glowing menace, but they don’t stay gone. Despite his “I’m a big rabbit” assertion, that glow creeps him out, so he stuffs them in the hamper and dons Plain White. Plain White satisfies him until he spies them: “Creepy underwear! So creepy! So comfy! They were glorious.” The underwear of his dreams is a pair of radioactive-green briefs with a Frankenstein face on the front, the green color standing out all the more due to Brown’s choice to do the entire book in grayscale save for the underwear’s glowing green…and glow they do, as Jasper soon discovers. Reynolds and Brown have crafted a Halloween tale that balances a really spooky premise with the hilarity that accompanies any mention of underwear. 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. 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 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 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.
Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. No more “Follow the Leader”-now it’s “Follow the Larry.” Lemmings, evidently, never learn.ĭespite the alluring artwork, this is a half-baked tale. This can’t be good, no matter the genetic impulse, thinks Larry, so he bolts to the front and steers them clear of the wayward impulse by leading them to his cabin, where they eat pepperoni pizza. So it is back to the lemmings, now merrily running toward the cliff’s edge. But the seals are too noisy, the puffins live on cliffs, and the bears appear to be sizing Larry up for lunch (some friends). So he tries life with his other friends: the puffins, seals, and polar bears. (If this is meant to open an inquiry into gender identity, it’s not pursued.) Larry just doesn’t cotton to the lemming way of life: burrowing, eating moss, jumping off cliffs en masse. In the accompanying illustration, Larry is wearing a grass skirt, lei, and hibiscus behind one ear. “I hear he wants to be called Mary,” says another. “Call me Larry,” he informs his indistinguishable mates. Living in this particular slice of the Arctic is a lemming that also happens to be an odd duck. Lemmings live up north, up on a tundra colored in Slater’s lovely swaths of pistachio green, ballpark-mustard yellow, and tangerine orange. Lemmings aren’t exactly known for their anti-establishment nonconformity, except for Briggs’ Larry, or is it Mary?
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