Mom, It's My First Day of Kindergarten! (review)

It's the first day of kindergarten, and our narrator's mother is anxious ("What if you don't have time to finish your sandwich at lunch? . . . Did I pack all your school supplies?") while her son is all confidence—until he gets there and wonders momentarily if he really is ready for "big kids' school." With just a little reassurance from his mom and his new teacher, however, he jumps right into kindergarten and has a marvelous time, while his mother's worries also lessen once he's there. This goes beyond usual school-start books with its role reversal and emotionally powerful illustrations, in which the worrying mother is tiny and blue-toned in contrast to her strapping, ruddy-cheeked son; as her fears decrease, Mom's color warms up and her size increases. The boy too shifts to blueness when anxiety strikes him at the door of his classroom (depicted on that page as an open door into blue-gray emptiness), but he's quickly back to normal inside the cheerful, kid-filled classroom. Confident kids like the protagonist will be tickled to find that it's the adult, and not the kid, who needs to be reassured, and they'll be intrigued by the visual representation of the characters' changing emotional states. Parents who are facing or who have survived their kids' "first days" will easily sympathize with the mother.