I received an arc of this title from NetGalley for an honest review. This book has some excellent artwork and poetry about the different seasons.

This wonderful book is an ode to Spring, the long awaited season that follows a dormant and freezing Winter. Spring brings hope and freshness as the plants begin to sprout, the sun warms the earth once again, and every person is eager to get outside and partake of the welcomed changes that are occurring. Most people, both young and old, are weary of the ice, snow and having to bundle up when they go outside. Spring is the season that unleashes that pent-up energy from being tucked away inside and demands freedom for the captives once again.

"Sing in the Spring!" is a rhyming celebration of this magical season which transforms the icy white of Winter into vibrant greens and fragrant coloured blossoms.

"Buds of leaves
still curled in knots
just like teeny polka dots
spots of green on bare-branched trees
soon buds will bloom and leaves
unfurl
yes, shimmery light
on every thing."


The unique and delightful artwork of Deb Plestid is created from quiltwork labours of love and are stunning to behold. Both the illustrations and the poems will bring happiness to hearts as they interact with all the magic and transformations that Spring has to offer. I highly recommend this book.



Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

As a quilter I really love the idea of quilted illustrations, and with fibre arts surging in popularity I think there is definitely a place for this style. Unfortunately, while the illustrations are beautiful, as a kids book this one just didn’t land for me. The quilted illustrations felt a bit too “grandma” to be fun for kids, and the poems didn’t hold my interest. I wanted to love this book, but it unfortunately didn’t deliver.

Cute picture book about winter turning to Spring. A liked the artwork. The wording was a bit long for a child to follow. I think it would be a bit much for my young child, but might be better when they’re older.

One benefit of being my age and yet so bloody childish is that I can easily revert back to a younger self, and judge whether I would have liked a book when I was the target reader. And unfortunately I cannot say that is the case at all here. Would I have appreciated the quilted, collaged feel of the artworks? Probably not. But the biggest problem – for the me of then and the me of now – is the fact the poetry below the imagery is so disjointed, dropping rhymes here, jumping styles, voice and approach there, and even switching concrete poetry on one occasion. It's not nearly clear enough that these are disparate works, as is evident when you later turn to the blurb and find it was written over a long span of years and is therefore lacking coherency as a result. Split this into double-paged spreads with their attendant words and it's still a clunky, awkward mish-mash of semi-hymnic appreciations of spring, but whatever you want to call it it certainly lacks the child-friendly style such a subject deserves. One and a half stars.