Baby librarian Marian and her mommy Margaret review the very special and splendid picture book Saturday
Marian reviews Saturday
Pink flamingos! There are lots of pink flamingos in this book, but they’re not on every page, so you have to look carefully. I see pink flamingos at the zoo, and they’re my second favorite animal to look at, my first being the monkies that make a lot of noise, closest to the entrance. Even when there’s not a pink flamingo on the page, there’s usually another pink thing–like a pink butterfly. I’m learning my colors right now, and green and pink are my two favorite colors.
I also learned about my days of the week from reading this book! Sort of. The end pages are a calendar, and Mommy is working on helping me figure it out. I see lots of numbers, and when I point to the words at the top, Mommy says “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.” And then we say hooray at Saturday. She calls these the days of the week, I guess because they all have the word day in them. I don’t know what a week is. I like all the numbers.
My favorite word in the book is “Zoom.” It’s spelled with more and more “o’s” as the book progresses. I know all the letters in Zoom, so it’s a lot of fun to get to those pages and spell it out! Sometimes, I skip all the other pages so we can spell Zoom over and over again.
On my Saturdays, Daddy is in charge and Mommy works. Mommy works from home so I visit her frequently while she works to help. Sometimes she won’t let me help and closes the door on my, which makes me cry. Why won’t Mommy let me pound the keyboard like her? It makes no sense. We do the same things Ava and her mommy do, just on different days of the week. We go to the library on Monday and Friday, sometimes Tuesday, we go to the playground every day but Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday, and every now and then we go see a puppet show, though those are special days. We never go to the salon. Mommy says I can go when I have more hair. But it’s so long already! I can brush it.
Overall, this is a fun book because of all the flamingos and the word Zoom. It’s also a learning book because I’m learning my days of the week. I definitely recommend it.
Margaret reviews Saturday
Oge Mora won numerous awards, including a Caldecott, for her debut picture book Thank You, Omu!
Saturday is Ava and her mom’s favorite day of the week. It’s the only day Ava’s mom doesn’t work. I only take off one day a month, so this is a lifestyle that reflects my own. Working-class and single-parent families (I am not a single parent, but I am working class) often do not have the luxury of weekends. So you have to make the most of the time you have, which is exactly what Ava and her mom do. They go to the library, the salon, the park, and anywhere else that sounds fun. But this Saturday is NOT going as planned. Everything that can go wrong does. Every parent knows the feeling of frustration when plans keep going awry. Ava and her mom try to breathe through each disappointment and stay positive, but at some point, it’s time to call it quits. But fun can and still does happen.
It’s such a fantastic story, and the art is lovely, a papercut style similar to Thank You, Omu! but in shades of pink, purple, and blue. Marian rarely lets me finish reading it. She prefers to look at the pictures and name everything she sees, which is how she’s been with most books for the past couple of weeks. Thankfully, this is a book with a lot of things to point at.