School Library Journal Review
PreS-Short, rhyming sentences, accompanied by large framed watercolor illustrations featuring Wells's signature rabbits on each page, pay tribute to all the ways a parent nurtures and teaches a child from birth onward. The young child narrator, whose gender is ambiguous, makes requests ("Be my teacher/from day one. Be my sky, my moon,/my sun") and enumerates all the things a mother does ("My first feeder./My first reader"). The illustrations, which include only a mother, elaborate on each brief statement by depicting the activities in which child and parent are engaged. For example, the picture above "Midnight staymate" contains a vaporizer, box of tissues, and medicine bottle-obvious indicators that the little one lying in bed embraced by Mom is ill. Small framed scenes on two opposite pages show the child learning to be polite, to share, and to help. The text, while brief, is filled with lovely metaphors such as "Kindness is our daily bread; gentle words, our feather bed" that would be difficult for very young children to understand. VERDICT This offering is a suitable gift for an expectant parent who might then use the object-filled endpapers as a vocabulary game after the little one arrives.-Marianne Saccardi, Children's Literature Consultant, Greenwich, CT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is Wells's version of a parenting manual, expressed as a string of entreaties from a small bunny to its mother, beginning at birth. "Be my teacher from day one," Wells writes, as the baby bunny looks directly at readers with bright, beseeching eyes. "Be my sky, my moon, my sun." The bunny and its calm, attentive mother share milestones as it grows-moments of caring and cuddling, and newfound competencies such as riding a bike. "Kindness is our daily bread;/ gentle words, our feather bed," writes Wells, as the intimate mother-child focus broadens to highlight tender interactions with a third rabbit who could represent a friend or sibling. By story's end, the mother's job is done: her bunny is literally launched into the world, a confident sailor on life's waves. Wells includes visual nods to Van Gogh's Starry Night, the pointillists, and Rousseau's jungle scenes, but this book is really about one thing alone: the idea that being a parent is the most important, wonderful job in the world. Ages 2-6. Agent: Brenda Bowen, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.