  | Make magic! do good! Author: Clayton, Dallas | |
| Price: $6.50 | ||
Summary:
Ideas run the gamut from stopping your lightning-fast running to help others keep up, imagining a store that sells colors never before made, or admitting you'll never know all the answers. A selection of playful, often provocative poems.
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Common Core Standards
Grade 3 → Reading → RL Literature → 3.RL Key Ideas & Details
Grade 3 → Reading → RL Literature → 3.RL Craft & Structure
Grade 3 → Reading → RL Literature → 3.RL Integration & Knowledge of Ideas
Grade 4 → Reading → RL Literature → 4.RL Key Ideas & Details
Grade 4 → Reading → RL Literature → 4.RL Range of Reading & Level of Text Complexity
Grade 4 → Reading → RL Literature → Texts Illustrating the Complexity, Quality, & Rang
Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews (10/01/12)
School Library Journal (10/01/12)
The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (M) (01/13)
Full Text Reviews:
School Library Journal - 10/01/2012 K Up—Clayton's work continues to grow and be infused with love and artistry. The imaginative life of his poems is reminiscent of Shel Silverstein's work. There is no sacrifice for the sake of rhyme; each one is just right and there's plenty of wisdom and humor. In "Xavier Xing Xu," Xavier is disappointed that the world doesn't contain more words like his name so he sets about finding friends to help "make it an art/to change all the S words/and put X at the start." The results are quite funny. Roughly hewn mixed-media drawings of pig-nosed unicorns, furry fleas, dragons and turtles, whales and giraffes support the warm, light tone. Wise advice is gently handled in a short verse that considers how it may not be best to be first: "second place may do just fine/in a race to hug a porcupine." Clayton wants to "share his happiness with you." This is an uplifting read, a little wonder that speaks of the magic and good in everyone and the importance of following one's dreams.—Teresa Pfeifer, Alfred Zanetti Montessori Magnet School, Springfield, MA - Copyright 2012 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.
Bulletin for the Center... - 01/01/2013 Nearly fifty rhymed verses appear in this initially self-published collection of poetry. Subjects range from kid-appealing topics such as unicorns, rainbows, and dragons to more conceptual matters (“Try,” “Enemies, “New Start”), and the style is friendly and colloquial; visuals are inviting, with each spread partnering an airy visual vignette and a poem. The strongest poems here are the short ones, such as “Robots” and “Sunshine” (“She blew a kiss/ it missed my face/ and drifted into outer space . . . ”), that bring pithy wit. Longer ones, though, often shift meter wildly, making them hard to read and harder to read aloud, and lines are often inflated with filler material just to get to a rhyme. The tone tips into the sentimental and the didactic, and while the lessons in many of the verses are worthy, they’re also clichéd, adult-inflected, and occasionally plain peculiar (“Amanda the Panda,” for instance, uses a panda’s eating of bamboo as a story about destructive consumption of resources). Adults keen on strong messages may find some of these verses to their taste, but this is territory better covered by the likes of Silverstein, Prelutsky, and Florian. Vignette illustrations have a pleasing graphic snap, with linework hatching that recalls linocuts and a James Marshall-esque rotundity to the figures. DS - Copyright 2013 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.
