Overview
What do you like about summer?
Picking cherries?
Curve balls?
Ice cream cones?
Bee swarms?
Thunderstorms?
Ninety degrees?
However you answered, Douglas Florian will convince you that summer is great. His poems and pictures add up to the best vacation imaginable — and it is one you can have at any time of the year. A companion volume to the highly praised Winter Eyes,Summersaults proves that Douglas Florian is a poet for all seasons.
Synopsis
You shivered with delight at Winter Eyes, Doug Florian's award-winning tribute to winter. Now prepare to leap for joy over Summersault, the best-selling author-artist's celebration of all things deliciously summer. In these twenty-eight exuberant poems, you'll find inspiration (and perhaps a dash of perspiration) in the hazy days, the fly balls, the swimming holes, and the treat of oh-so-bare feet. Even the thunderstorms and mosquito bites seem too good to miss. And if you're not ready to tumble into autumn at the end of the season, don't sweat it—do Summersaults!
About the Author: Douglas Florian is the author-artist of A Pig is Big and Winter Eyes, a New York Times Best Illustrated Book. He lives in New York City.
Publishers Weekly
From the playful initial poems What I Love About Summer and What I Hate About Summer to the final contemplation of a future snowy day, Florian's companion volume to Winter Eyes overflows with inventive verses celebrating the delights and discontents of summer. Like chalk drawings on a hot sidewalk, the green and sunny watercolor-and-pencil illustrations capture The Sum of Summer including four fillion flies And five sillion fleas And uncounted numbers Of sweet memories, and concrete poems such as Summersaults and Double Dutch Girls cleverly mirror their subject matter. Florian's child-like paintings show ordinary pleasures, like skateboarding and eating watermelon, as well as more fanciful images of a girl swinging to the stars or being carried away by a giant mosquito. Florian's poems are often simple, rhythmic lists with an ending twist, as in Greenager: Green grass. Green trees. Grasshoppers With green knees ... Summer's green Wall to wall. Occasionally the poet's couplets scramble syntax (As mosquitos buzz your ear, Green cicadas you may hear) or his images strain to fit the rhyme more than the meaning (The dande-lion doesn't roar. It's quiet as a closet door). Over all, however, the poems are rhythmic, imaginative and packed like a cottage trunk with the long beach days and campfire nights of summer. Ages 5-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
From the playful initial poems What I Love About Summer and What I Hate About Summer to the final contemplation of a future snowy day, Florian's companion volume to Winter Eyes overflows with inventive verses celebrating the delights and discontents of summer. Like chalk drawings on a hot sidewalk, the green and sunny watercolor-and-pencil illustrations capture The Sum of Summer including four fillion flies And five sillion fleas And uncounted numbers Of sweet memories, and concrete poems such as Summersaults and Double Dutch Girls cleverly mirror their subject matter. Florian's child-like paintings show ordinary pleasures, like skateboarding and eating watermelon, as well as more fanciful images of a girl swinging to the stars or being carried away by a giant mosquito. Florian's poems are often simple, rhythmic lists with an ending twist, as in Greenager: Green grass. Green trees. Grasshoppers With green knees ... Summer's green Wall to wall. Occasionally the poet's couplets scramble syntax (As mosquitos buzz your ear, Green cicadas you may hear) or his images strain to fit the rhyme more than the meaning (The dande-lion doesn't roar. It's quiet as a closet door). Over all, however, the poems are rhythmic, imaginative and packed like a cottage trunk with the long beach days and campfire nights of summer. Ages 5-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.Children's Literature
Florian has charmed adults and children with his poems and paints and this new collection of twenty-eight poems celebrates the joys of summer. It is a sizzling contrast to his award-winning book Winter Eyes. What did summertime mean to most of us as kids? Days of freedom and time to play outside, bare feet, an ocean or pool to swim in and green grass for tumbling and running. Summer, however, is not without its drawbacks—there are flies, fleas, thunderstorms, heat and humidity, but that is not enough to dispel the joy of summertime. The poem "Some Summers" depicts a variety of suns and just as they differ, so do various summers and summer days. One poem that may resonate with kids is appropriately titled "Three Words." "Three words/Most cruel:/Back to school." Never fear, the playful Florian does not end the book on that slightly unhappy note. There are still more poems that celebrate fireflies, campfires and summer nights. A good choice for kids starting to feel the urge to let loose as the days grow longer and warmer.—Marilyn Courtot