The Little Green Island with a Little Red House
A Book of Colors and Critters
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Remember how you once could spend hours watching the busy, small inhabitants of your childhood garden--the ones that burrowed, scampered, or buzzed? Every young person is a naturalist at heart. And remember how exciting it was to have more colors than just the basic eight in the crayon box? Even the names of those wonderful hues were fun to say aloud: scarlet, sapphire, chartreuse.
In The Little Green Island with a Little Red House, acclaimed illustrator, naturalist, and garden writer Sharon Lovejoy melds gentle rhyme and winsome illustrations to introduce young readers to the little beige bat, the scarlet newt in the yellow boot, and many other creatures that share her island home.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this petite, rebus-style sketchbook inspired by her real red house in Maine, Lovejoy (Sunflower Houses) records a rainbow-like menagerie of winsome animals and pretty plants, while encouraging readers to add to their color vocabulary words like "chartreuse" and "ochre." A typical passage occupies a spread and evokes both setting and character: "The little green island/ has a little scarlet newt/ who lives all alone/ in a little rubber boot." Lovejoy's diminutive but detailed watercolors emerge from the pages' white space, while the large, playful typography uses color shadings to emphasize key words ("green" and "scarlet") and occasionally shrinks just for fun ("little" and any word that identifies the subject of the paintings "island," "newt," "boot"). Children who expect the author's string of observations to add up to a genuine story or even a punchline may be disappointed. But the sweet spot illustrations radiate plenty of charm and create a sense of this New England retreat. A reflective paper inset on the final spread lets readers imagine that they're gazing into a silvery tide pool. Ages 3-up.
