Bound To Stay Bound

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Booklist - 01/01/2009 *Starred Review* Created by a husband-and-wife team, this delightful picture book bridges the space between concept books and longer narrative stories. An unseen narrator hears birds singing through an open window and looks out to see birds that represent concepts, such as color, shape, size, and number. The story becomes more sophisticated as it progresses. The narrator’s questions about birds open an exploration into more abstract, organic concepts about the natural environment: “If birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew, think what the sky would look like,” for example. At the story’s end, the now-visible narrator, having imagined herself as a bird throughout the book, is back at her window, singing. Henkes’ spare, direct words have a lyrical magic, while Dronzek’s bright acrylic paintings, in saturated primary color and heavy black outlines, reflect the text’s plain elegance while carrying an exuberant energy all their own. One particularly memorable spread shows a large flock of black birds filling the sky in elegant trajectories of flight. Together, the words and pictures create a book that will enchant preschool audiences again and again. - Copyright 2009 Booklist.

Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2009 “In the morning,” says our young narrator, “I hear birds singing through the open window.” She goes on to describe kinds of birds (“Sometimes they are so black that you can’t see their eyes or their feathers, just their shapes”) and some surprising and memorable bird encounters, and she offers some lyrical consideration of birdness (“If clouds were birds, the sky would look like this”). Though text’s conclusion is a little random, the girl’s imaginative contemplations are poetically conceived yet youthfully accessible, and the combination of simple bird facts and dreamy avian-themed thoughts effectively approximates a young child’s category-resistant considerations of a topic. Dronzek’s illustrations employ acrylic paints, outlined with thick black lines sometimes suggesting the smooth emollience of oil pastel. The strong figures and luminous colors give the birds a strong graphic impact, while the soft touches and the neatly original compositions add narrative interest to the visuals. Use this as a counterpart to more concrete birdy accounts or as a bridge between nature study and nature poetry. DS - Copyright 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

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