Summer Is Here

by Renée Watson (Author) Bea Jackson (Illustrator)

Reading Level: K − 1st Grade
New York Times bestselling creators Renée Watson and Bea Jackson offer a picture book ode to a picture-perfect summer day, from sunrise to sunset.

Summer is here!
No dark clouds in the sky,
it's a perfect day for play.
What joy will summer bring me today?


Summer is finally here, and she's bringing the most perfect day! From sunup to sundown, there's so much to do on this lovely summer day. With summer comes fresh fruit, sweet and tangy, jump ropes for leaping and dancing, and friends at the pool swimming and floating. Summer brings family cookouts under shady trees, gardens overflowing, and the familiar song of the ice-cream truck. This beautiful ode to all the season's sensations follows one girl's perfect day in an exploration of joy, family, friendship, sunshine, and wonder.

Her stars shimmer like spilled glitter across the sky.
I whisper a wish and say goodbye to the day.
I wish summer would stay.


Renée Watson celebrates iconic childhood joys in this love letter to summer featuring bright, sun-drenched art from Bea Jackson.
Select format:
Hardcover
$18.99

Publishers Weekly

Starred Review

A dark-skinned Black protagonist embraces summer via a litany of seasonal activities in this experiential first-person ode. Waking to the sun beaming through a bedroom window, the young narrator describes the orb "waking me up with her light./ Her sunrays tickle me." As the day progresses, summer reveals its pleasures through summer fruits ("fat mangoes, bursting with juice/ deep-red strawberries that stain my hands"), pool time with friends ("Our bright swimsuits float... like lily pads"), a game of double Dutch, and a community cookout "under trees full of leaves to shade us." Jackson (The Twelve Hours of Christmas) employs bright light and sunlit hues to capture the ease and lengthy rhythms of an enjoyable summer's day, while sensate prose from Watson (Maya's Song) leads beat-by-beat to group play with water balloons and bubbles, a summer song from the ice-cream truck, and, after bedtime, an earnest desire offered from an open window: "I wish summer would stay." It's a yearning celebration of a fleeting season that, like "gigantic bubbles that hang on to my wand," floats "away, gone, gone, gone." Background characters are portrayed with various body types and skin tones. Ages 3-6. (May)

Copyright 2024 Publishers Weekly, LLC Used with permission.

Kirkus

An utterly immersive celebration of the boundless joys of summer—may they never end!

Review quotes


Renée Watson

Renée Watson is a New York Times bestselling author. Her novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award. Her books include Love is a Revolution, Ways to Make Sunshine, Some Places More Than Others, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, and Watch Us Rise, co-written with Ellen Hagan, as well as two acclaimed picture books: A Place Where Hurricanes Happen and Harlem's Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée grew up in Portland, Oregon, and splits her time between Portland and New York City.

www.reneewatson.net
@harlemportland (Instagram)
@reneewauthor (Twitter)

Classification
Fiction
ISBN-13
9781547605866
Lexile Measure
-
Guided Reading Level
-
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publication date
May 07, 2024
Series
-
BISAC categories
JUV039060 - Juvenile Fiction | Social Themes | Friendship
JUV011010 - Juvenile Fiction | People & Places | United States - African-American
JUV009100 - Juvenile Fiction | Concepts | Seasons
Library of Congress categories
African Americans
Picture books
Summer
Play

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