There Is a Tribe of Kids
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Kate Greenaway Medal
When a young boy embarks on a journey alone . . .
he trails a colony of penguins,
undulates in a smack of jellyfish,
clasps hands with a constellation of stars,
naps for a night in a bed of clams,
and follows a trail of shells,
home to his tribe of friends.
If Lane Smith's Caldecott Honor Book Grandpa Green was an homage to aging and the end of life, There Is a Tribe of Kids is a meditation on childhood and life's beginning. Smith's vibrant sponge-paint illustrations and use of unusual collective nouns such as smack and unkindness bring the book to life. Whimsical, expressive, and perfectly paced, this story plays with language as much as it embodies imagination, and was awarded the 2017 Kate Greenaway Medal.
This title has Common Core connections.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though Smith's story is mostly built around terms for groups of animals "a crash of rhinos," "an unkindness of ravens" it stars a solitary human child, a cross between Peter Pan and Mowgli. Dressed in leaves, he kneels among baby mountain goats ("There was a tribe of kids") until their mother leads them out of reach. He dances with penguins until they swim away. He crawls along with a caterpillar, then hangs upside down next to it until the inevitable happens: "There was a flight of butterflies." All of these goodbyes have a wistful sameness, so readers will rejoice when at last the child finds his own tribe of kids a rainbow of leaf-clad children. One of the book's delights is its shifting moods and colors, which feel like the movements of an orchestral work. The textures Smith (Return to Augie Hobble) builds up seem organically formed, as if waves and time had worn them down, yet the spreads are vivid and clean. Every living being, Smith implies, needs a place to belong, and children, especially, need other children. Ages 5 8.
