Quirky, informative, and far from soporific.
The first page warns readers to quiet down since the animals in the book are sleepy and need to rest. A few more brief sentences conversationally introduce the book’s premise. However, the book is far from a bedtime story. Even that initial page sports vividly colored sleepy animals, and they are yawning and stretching over a background that is several shades brighter than lavender. The facing page sets up a pleasant, repeating pattern. Instead of the full bleed of the verso, stark white frames a roughly hewn oblong, within which a cartoon child snuggles in a bedroom in solid hues of cool-palette colors. “While you cover yourself with a blanket…” begins the litany, “…an otter wraps itself in seaweed,” proclaims black print over a background of rippling blues upon the page turn. Three seaweed-swaddled sea otters drift below a short, informative paragraph that compares the use of the seaweed to both a blanket and a boat’s anchor. The text’s tone is lighthearted, with humorous word choices conveying fascinating facts. How imaginative to compare a child pulling on pajamas to a parrotfish nightly “burping up” its protective coating of slime! Upbeat graphics provide a wide range of human diversity, including one White child who uses a wheelchair and a family that appears to be multiracial.
Quirky, informative, and far from soporific. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: March 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77147-404-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2021
An in-depth and visually pleasing look at one of the most fundamental forces in the universe.
An introduction to gravity.
The book opens with the most iconic demonstration of gravity, an apple falling. Throughout, Herz tackles both huge concepts—how gravity compresses atoms to form stars and how black holes pull all kinds of matter toward them—and more concrete ones: how gravity allows you to jump up and then come back down to the ground. Gravity narrates in spare yet lyrical verse, explaining how it creates planets and compresses atoms and comparing itself to a hug. “My embrace is tight enough that you don’t float like a balloon, but loose enough that you can run and leap and play.” Gravity personifies itself at times: “I am stubborn—the bigger things are, the harder I pull.” Beautiful illustrations depict swirling planets and black holes alongside racially diverse children playing, running, and jumping, all thanks to gravity. Thorough backmatter discusses how Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity and explains Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. While at times Herz’s explanations may be a bit too technical for some readers, burgeoning scientists will be drawn in.
An in-depth and visually pleasing look at one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668936849
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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