Summersaults [Hardcover]

Douglas Florian (Author, Illustrator)

Book Description

Age Level: 5 and up | Grade Level: K and up

What do you like about summer?

Mountain hikes?
Picking cherries?
Curve balls?
Ice cream cones?

What do you not like about summer?

Blackouts?
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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's summertime, and if you're a kid, the living can be very easy indeed. Douglas Florian's ode to the simmering, shimmering, sizzling, fizzling, flaming season of sun places every reader smack dab in the middle of a summer day (or night), with all its resident fireflies, cartwheels, green frogs, and sidewalk scooters. This companion volume to Florian's award-winning Winter Eyes celebrates summer with 48 short poems and accompanying watercolor and colored pencil illustrations. In "Bees," a child pithily reports:

I'm pleased by bees
Except for one thing:
The sting.

Against a brilliant yellow green grassy background, a redheaded boy sits placidly reading inside mosquito netting, half a dozen bees buzzing longingly nearby. Swarming with humor and honesty about barefoot days, humid nights, and those "Three words / Most cruel: / Back to school," this bright collection by the talented author-illustrator of Lizards, Frogs, and Polliwogs will demand year-round attention. (Ages 5 and older) --Emilie Coulter

From 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.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 5 and up
  
• Hardcover: 48 pages
• Publisher: Greenwillow Books; 1st edition (March 26, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060292679
• ISBN-13: 978-0060292676
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,230,058 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Douglas Florian is the creator of many acclaimed picture books including Dinothesaurus, which received starred reviews in four major publications, Comet, Stars, The Moon and Mars, a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and Horn Book Fanfare List selection; Bow Wow Meow Meow, winner of the Gryphon Award and a Parents Magazine Best Book of the Year; and Lizards, Frogs and Polliwogs, a Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book. He lives with his family in New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Very Best Time of the Year....., April 24, 2002

By 

Roz Levine - See all my reviews

This review is from: Summersaults (Hardcover)

Summer, the very best season of the year, is captured in Douglas Florian's marvelous new poetry collection, Summersaults. These 28 poems evoke the sheer joy of sizzling, shimmering, simmering, hazy, hot summer days, and the carefree fun of baseball, swimming, buzzing bees, and annoying flies, ocean waves, ice-cream cones, scooters, bikes and roller skates, fireflies, jumping rope, thunderstorms, and campfires. Mr Florian's delightful, engaging, rhyming verses are full of imagery, wordplay, energy and puns, and complemented by his cheerful childlike artwork in summer tones of bright greens, yellows, and blues. Together word and art deliver the magic of summer in all its simple splendor. Perfect for children of all ages, Summersaults is a charming little treasure, best read aloud and shared, that can take the coldest, snowiest day of the year, and turn it into a blazing, sun-filled day at the beach.

3.0 out of 5 stars Took a while, but worth the wait, May 4, 2009

By 

Maureen P. Mason - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Summersaults (Hardcover)

Took a few more weeks than expected to arrive but once it did, it was great!