Yellow Ball (Picture Puffins) - Softcover

Bang, Molly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140548289 ISBN 13: 9780140548280

Publisher: Puffin Books, 1993

Synopsis

Full-color illustrations highlight a clever adventure story about a forgotten ball that drifts out to sea, endures a violent storm, and washes ashore to be found by a new young owner. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author:

Molly Bang lives in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

From School Library Journal:

PreSchool-K-- The prodigiously talented Bang uses pastels, tempera paint, and some collage to create shimmering pictures of beaches and the sea in this story about a yellow ball that is lost in play. She employs unusual perspectives, rich colors, and wonderful textures as the ball goes to sea through a storm and a night to another sunny, empty beach where a little boy finds it and rapturously carries it home. The brilliant light on the final beach and the tenderly portrayed mother and child who joyously find the ball are almost worth the whole book. Unfortunately, the simple text creates a jarring effect and the resulting story line seems arbitrary. Somehow the movement and pace is off, and readers' emotions are not engaged. The young people who lose the ball look like adults on one page and children on the next. The concepts used don't quite fit. For example, "catch" and "throw" don't match the gestures they caption. The panel captioned "above" suggests a picture of the sun as much as a ball. The placement of the ball in subsequent pictures creates a sense of dislocation rather than coherent movement. This simple picture book could be seen as a story of a carelessly treated toy finding a loving home, but the beautiful pictures call for poetry, not abrupt phrases. An unsuccessful work by Bang is better than many picture books on the market, but she has set a fine standard, and this effort falls short. Large collections will want it for the high calibre of the art. --Marilyn Iarusso, New York Pub . Lib .
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Puffin Books
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0140548289
• ISBN 13: 9780140548280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 32
• Illustrator: Bang Molly