Our Little Kitchen
Abrams (US), Groundwood (CAN), Sept 2020
Picture book, 48 pages, full colour
From Abrams:
Tie on your apron! Roll up your sleeves!
Pans are out, oven is hot, the kitchen’s all ready!
Where do we start?
In this lively, rousing picture book from Caldecott Honoree Jillian Tamaki, a crew of resourceful neighbors comes together to prepare a meal for their community. With a garden full of produce, a joyfully chaotic kitchen, and a friendly meal shared at the table, Our Little Kitchen is a celebration of full bellies and looking out for one another. Bonus materials include recipes and an author’s note about the volunteering experience that inspired the book.
“Clear-line panel artwork by Tamaki gives the action superhero-grade visual power with swoops and swirls in swaths of tomato red, avocado green, and beet pink. Smells drift deliciously around the group’s noses, the chief cook tumbles through cascades of beans, and speech balloons collide like atoms. By making the collaborative meal preparation visually brilliant, Tamaki injects energy into this life-giving celebration.” -Publishers Weekly
“Nib-and-ink linework swooshes across the pages, emulating the controlled frenzy and depicting a thoughtfully diverse cast of warmhearted people. Endpapers offer simple recipes for vegetable soup and apple crumble; adults familiar with Lucy Knisley and Samin Nosrat will swoon at the sight of these graphically rendered recipes.” -Kirkus
“A sense of effervescent improvisation pervades the tale, through its cookery details and the text’s rhythm and design. We see frequent shifts between main text and dialogue, with speech bubbles barely containing the conversational chatter the rewarding, drawn out “Slurp” near the end contains six Ss, six Ls, four Us, five Rs, and four Ps, all uppercase and of varying sizes. The illustrations themselves, “done with a nib and ink” and colored digitally feature surehanded black outlines, comics-style, around characters of all ages, shapes, races, religions, abilities, and genders, each of whom exudes vibrancy, warmth, individuality, and purpose.” -The Horn Book
Eisner Winner, Best Publication for Early Readers / Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award / Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection / New York Times Best Children’s Book List 2020 / Publishers Weekly Best Books 2020 / Washington Post’s Best Children’s Books 2020 / Globe & Mail “Our Favourite Books of 2020” / Starred reviews: Booklist, Horn Book, Publishers Weekly / TD Summer Reading Club selection 2023
