![]() ![]() In fact, Mayes says in the endnotes that young people are Kwanzaa’s “largest audience and most important constituents” and further extends an invitation to all races and ages to join the winter celebration. Mayes take great pains-and in painfully simplistic language-to provide a context that attempts to refute the internal arguments as much as it informs its intended audience. This book arrives at a time when black people in the United States have had intraracial-some serious, some snarky-conversations about Kwanzaa’s relevance nowadays, from its patchwork inspiration that flattens the cultural diversity of the African continent to a single festive story to, relatedly, the earnest blacker-than-thou pretentiousness surrounding it. The sentences and vocabulary are simple, but finding them on the page is the challenge here.īig fun for new readers who are ready to turn their Where’s Waldo skills to finding text.Īn overview of the modern African-American holiday. While this clever conceit is carried out with accessible text, there is a little quibble: the saturation and intentional busyness of the illustrations leaves little rest for new readers’ eyes. The reveal at the conclusion is that Big Bunny is not a giant but a large helium balloon of the sort seen in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Shifting perspective and scale make it clear that the creature is not just another one of these animals, and many readers will use the title and cover image to infer that they belong to the eponymous Big Bunny. Their stark whiteness makes them stand out on the pages, which depict a busy, vibrant setting reminiscent of those in Richard Scarry books and are likewise populated by anthropomorphic animals going about their days. These named body parts belong to a figure that isn’t wholly visible until the book’s end, provoking readers to search them out in the detailed images. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Big Bunny!Ĭontrolled, repetitive text invites children to read short sentences directing them to find “a foot…a hand…a tail,” and so on. ![]()
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