Skip to main content

Joyful Noise

Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices
Written by Paul Fleischman
Illustrated by Eric Beddows
Harper Trophy, 1988. Newbery. 44 pgs.
What is the caterpillar thinking about while wrapped in its cocoon throughout the cold winter months? We can’t be 100 percent sure, but Paul Fleischman probably gets as close as anyone with a fascinating poetic peek into the day-to-day thoughts of our smallest 6-legged friends.

Joyful Noise is a celebration of life with each poem written in two-columns scripts for a child to read aloud with a friend, sibling, or parent. Accompanied by vivid pencil sketches, Fleischman writes short, brilliant lines that allow you to become a disgruntled worker bee or the luxurious queen. Step into the hilarious misadventures of an old married booklice couple, experience the sorrow of the lonely digger wasp that will never see her eggs hatch, or feel the exuberant bouncing of a grasshopper in spring. With just the right words, these poems create a musical experience for readers.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Review: Kareem Between

  Kareem Between By Shifa Saltagi Safadi New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2024. Fiction. 324 pages.  Kareem loves football and as he gets ready to start seventh grade he dreams of someday becoming the first Syrian American NFL player. Seventh grade is not off to a great start for Kareem, after football tryouts don't go as he had planned, his best friend moves away, and his mom returns to Syria to help bring his sick grandfather to the US for treatment. So when Austin, the quarterback and coach's son, offers to talk to his dad and get Kareem on the football team in the spring, if he will cheat and do his homework for him, Kareem agrees. Kareem really wants to fit in at school and he is desperate to find a friend, but deep down he knows that doing Austin's homework isn't the right thing to do. And to make things harder, Kareem's mom asks him to be a friend to Fadi, a Syrian Christian refugee. He knows he should stand up for Fadi and help him adjust to the new school,...

Review: Sole Survivor

  Sole Survivor  Written By Norman Ollestad and Brendan Kiely  New York: Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, 2025. 255 pages.  This is a juvenile biography/memoire about the plane crash that Norman Ollestad survived when he was a sixth grader. The book starts off with Norman wining a skiing competition and heading home to play in a hockey game only to head onto an airplane with his dad, his dad’s girlfriend (Sandra), and the pilot so he could go and claim his trophy for the skiing competition. Only, the plane crashed and the pilot and Norman’s dad were killed. Then when Sandra falls and dies as well, Norman is left as the sole survivor from the plane crash in the San Gabriel Mountains during a snowstorm.  Fans of Hatchet or other adventure novels will love reading how Norman survived this ordeal. And they will be even more impressed with the fact that this is a true story and the person who survived and is still alive today. This book goes over all of...

If You Like...KPop Demon Hunters

KPop Demon Hunters has been one of the most talked-about movies of the summer. If you loved this movie as much as I did, you don't want the magic (or the music) to stop. Try reading these books that touch on some of the same topics and themes as the animated hit! Brick Dust and Bones By M. R. Fournet New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2023. Fiction. 247 pages. Orphaned Marius works in the family business--as their cemetery's ghost caretaker. However, Marius also moonlights as a monster hunter in order to earn the costly Mystic currency he needs to bring his mother back from the dead. As the window to bring his mother back begins to close, Marius's exploits get more and more dangerous, and he may have set his sights on a monster too big to handle on his own. Like Mira, Marius longs for familial connection, and his work as a monster hunter will satisfy the thrill of demon hunting for fans the movie. Where's Halmoni? By Julie J. Kim Seattle, WA: Little Bigfoot, 2017. Comics. W...