Bound To Stay Bound

School Library Journal - 06/01/2022 Gr 1–2—This rhyming picture book describes math as part of our daily lives, such as counting eggs, recognizing patterns in the city, and the distance traveled in a car. Spreads feature four lines of rhyming text along with colorful drawings of a relatively diverse group of children engaging in typical activities. The simple text does not attempt to explain how math works. Instead, it serves to introduce the subject to young children: "What is math?/ It's building a house./ It's the pattern of seasons./ The size of a mouse." Yoshikawa brings the same colorful, cheerful, and appealing illustration style that she used in Stephanie Calmenson's Late for School! to this work. VERDICT Overall, the book is a fun and engaging introduction to math and a solid purchase for libraries looking to expand their early math collections.—Kate Rao - Copyright 2022 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission.

Booklist - 06/01/2022 Jaunty rhymes pair with illustrations of energetic children with large, round, expressive faces in schools, neighborhoods, and homes to introduce some of the many ways math fills our lives. At a birthday party, children use numbers to play bingo, fractions to divide up a pizza, and more. Other cheery, busy scenes depict the children measuring ingredients for a recipe, calculating the distance they ride on the school bus, and earning money at a lemonade stand. The concepts of counting, adding, subtracting, comparing, and sorting are included in addition to lessons on weight, calendars, time, shapes, patterns, graphs, and charts. Young readers will enjoy spotting how a black cat and white dog enhance both the merriment and math concepts in each scene. The endpapers sport even more fun and develop visual literacy skills as opening shapes, such as a circle, oval, and hexagon, become a donut, football, and spider web on the closing endpapers. A delightful first look at STEM. - Copyright 2022 Booklist.