The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race two students even sport glasses. The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol. Rip-roaring verse but painfully simplistic messaging. Moreover, the notion that interracial couples and mixed-race offspring-a purple Smed/Smoo baby-are a solution for racism is false and places an unfair burden on mixed-race readers. This unsubtle metaphor for fixing racism and xenophobia ignores real-world power imbalances: The Smeds and Smoos may distrust one another, but they share equal status. (Grandfather Sned had forgotten to lock it.) / Bill pressed the button, and Janet steered… // …When their families woke, they had both disappeared!” A multiplanet search leads to reconciliation and integration.

They clambered into the Smeds’ red rocket. “Janet and Bill stole out that night / While their families slept / and the squoon shone bright. Despite parallel contemptuous commands to “Never, never play with” the other group, Janet and Bill secretly bond and grow up to marry.

The illustrations’ eye-catching colors are intensely saturated throughout, sometimes jarringly so.

Smeds and Smoos alike have antennae and tubular noses, but Smeds, red, have webbed feet they wear bare while Smoos, blue, sport elflike boots. Not far away, on a humplety hill, / There lived a young Smoo / by the name of Bill.” The patter and nonsense words ( wurpular, trockle) invoke Dr. “By a loobular lake on a far-off planet / There lived a young Smed, / and her name was Janet. This tale of prejudiced extraterrestrials jumps immediately into rollicking verse. Two youngsters from mutually hostile groups connect.

The smeds and the smoo