Review by Booklist Review
Ages 2-5. The illustrator of Growing Vegetable Soup (Booklist 83:1012 Mr 1 87) now offers a graphic celebration of planting a glorious flower garden. Bulbs planted in the fall and seeds and seedlings set out in the spring mature into a riot of color. Bold, bright collagelike illustrations display the hues. At the close, vertically banded, shortened pages line up in a rainbow spectrum. The stylized representations of flower species are labeled throughout, allowing young children to get an idea of how each flower type contributes to the rainbow effect. The book's simple concept is effectively executed; this begs to be shared with youngsters, who may contribute their own suggestions for planting a rainbow. DMW. Gardening-Fiction / Flowers-Fiction [CIP] 87-8528
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With her characteristically vibrant artwork, Ehlert depicts the planting of a family garden. Ages 3-7. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 1 Planting a Rainbow , a companion to Ehlert's Growing Vegetable Soup (HBJ, 1987), is a dazzling celebration of the colorful variety in a flower garden and the cyclical excitement of gardening. A young child relates in ten simple sentences the yearly cycle and process of planning, planting, and picking flowers in a garden. Mother and child plant bulbs in fall, order seeds from catalogs in winter, eagerly anticipate the first shoots of spring, select seedlings in summer, ``and watch the rainbow grow,'' reveling in the opulence of color. The power of this book lies in the glowing brilliance and bold abstraction of the double-page collages. Ehlert combines simple, stylized shapes of flat, high intensity color into abstract yet readily identifiable images of plants and flowers while clearly and colorfully labeling each plant on an adjacent garden marker. Children will especially delight in the six pages of varying width depicting all the flowers of each color of the rainbow. A celebration of the garden, the power of shape and color, and the harmony of text and image in a picture book. Pamela Miller Ness, The Fenn School, Concord, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
From the artist who created last year's shoutingly vivid Growing Vegetable Soup, a companion volume about raising a flower garden. ""Mom and I"" plant bulbs (even rhizomes), choose seeds, buy seedlings, and altogether grow about 20 species. Unlike the vegetables, whose juxtaposed colors were almost painfully bright, the flowers make a splendidly gaudy array, first taken together and then interestingly grouped by color--the pages vary in size here so that colored strips down the right-hand side combine to make a broad rainbow. Bold, stylish, and indubitably inspired by real flowers, there is still (as with its predecessor) a link missing between these illustrations with their large, solid areas of color and the real experience of a garden. The stylized forms are almost more abstractions than representations (and why is the daisy yellow?). There is also little sense of the relative times for growing and blooming--everything seems to come almost at once. Perhaps the trouble is that Ehlert has captured all the color of the garden, but not its subtle gradations or the light, the space, the air, and the continual movement and change. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
