Poems in Black & White

The recommended audience age for this book is 9-12 years old. I'm 44 years old and thereby disqualified from offering an informed perspective. But then I averaged the recommended audience age and divided my age by that number and came up with 4.2. So, now I'm qualified and this review is actually equivalent to five reviews: Four reviews are by ten and a half year olds and one review is by a two-year old. This seems not only fair but reasonable since children don't routinely review books intended for adults - which is a good thing for us children since adult literature seems to favor the drama of self absorption over having fun. Or maybe that is adult fun. Anyway, back to Kate Miller's Poems in Black and White. We liked it. It got us thinking and looking at the world around us in a new way again - which is a real gift, particularly to us ten and a half year olds. It was fun to see who could discover the most things which are just black and white, like panda bears and white-walled tires and Oreo cookies!. We liked the pictures a lot too and we drew our own favorite black and white things - like shiny black shoes with white laces and zebras and magpies. We also wrote our own poems to go along with our pictures - which are now on our refrigerators at home. It was hard but it was fun to try to see everyday things in a new way - to discover that simple things can be complicated and complicated things can be simple. Maybe this will help us when we get really, really old - like forty-four. The two-year old says: "foot, rattle, star, bug, cat, doggy, popcorn, grandpa, cow, hair, raccoon, moon, snow, ball, bird, doggy, bedtime.", and that's a very favorable review.