Title: Lemon Child
Author: Nele Brönner
Release Date: 5 May 2020
Number of Pages: 32
Lemon Child is a bizarre little story about a lemon named Tony who doesn’t want to turn yellow and leave the tree. He’s quite bitter about his lemon siblings growing up, and he would much rather stay in the shade and stay green. Eventually, once all the other lemons are gone, some animals persuade him to finally leave the tree by telling him about all the things a lemon can become. Tony decides to leave the tree, and a boy picks him up and puts him in his window, the end.
I had to reread this book a few times to wrap my head around what was going on. Each time I finished the book, I desperately tried to see if there were more pages because the story just ends. I think that this book is supposed to be about growing up and maturity, but it just didn’t work for me. I didn’t like that Tony was told that he could be anything that he wanted to be and the put in a window because any adult reading this book knows that he’s likely going to rot away and not achieve anything. I would have liked this book better if it had a few more pages, and it showed Tony turning yellow in the window, and then being used for lemonade and lemon zest and having his seeds planted in the garden.
I also wasn’t a fan of the illustrations in this book, mostly because the lemons looked kind of scary. I don’t want to be dramatic, but I won’t be surprised if they haunt my dreams. I did like that at the beginning and end of the book; there were pages of illustrations of different citrus fruit and citrus things, and I thought it was a cute touch. I thought that the font used was a bit too small; however, I was reading this as a PDF, and it might be bigger in the printed book.
Rating: 2 Stars!
