Ivy in Bloom book review

Ivy in Bloom: The Poetry of Spring from Great Poets and Writers from the Past by Vanita Oelschlager
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an electronic copy of this book through Net Galley upon request, and was excited to dig in! It is apparently quite short, as it is a children's story book, with beautiful illustrations. I could not get over how clean, crisp, and bright the illustrations were. The story itself is basically a poem about a young girl that is waiting for spring to come, and then how lovely spring is. My first opinion reading through it, was that it felt very disjointed, almost as if it wasn't the same style of writing throughout the book, aside from the first few pages. Apparently I was right! After the story, there are several pages listing full poems by many writers (such as Dickens and Longfellow), with lines or phrases within each poem highlighted in green that was used within the story. The first few pages seemed to be a full poem written by the author of the book, which explains why I felt the first few pages flowed and the rest seemed disjointed and not of the same pen. I am not quite sure how I feel about it overall. The illustrations are beautiful as I mentioned, and I did like how the story was going in the beginning, but I think all the different writers smashed together doesn't make for a nice flowing poetry story book. I did, however, like reading through all of the poems in the back of the book that most of the lines from the book came from. I think it may have sounded better if the author had written the entire thing, so it felt more cohesive. I also liked seeing a bunch of poems by many authors with lines highlighted to match a certain theme. Together though, not 100% my favorite.

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