A good introduction to an important pathfinder among women naturalists.
D’Aquino distills the life of ornithologist and activist Florence Merriam Bailey.
The narrative highlights salient moments in Bailey’s childhood: a summerlong camping trip with her father and brother; learning about stars and planets with her astronomer mother. Through elision and metaphor, D’Aquino links bird song to Bailey’s awakening consciousness: “She had the feeling they had something important to tell her.” Bailey’s activism was sharpened by the global decimation of bird species to supply the Euro-American millinery trade’s insatiable appetite for the bodies and plumage of birds. “People thought wearing birds on hats looked beautiful. To Bailey, those hats were the ugliest things she had ever seen.” Modernist collage illustrations contrast grayscale with bright color to emphasize nature’s paramount beauty and importance. Thus, two fashionable women, portrayed in black-and-white garb against a painted gray background, wear elaborate hats composed of colorful plumage and bird corpses. (D’Aquino sidesteps patriarchy’s profiteering role in the trend, for which women alone were pilloried.) Bailey’s tools for quiet observation of live birds—a camera, notebook, pencils, binoculars, and ears—are depicted; 10 common birds accompany their phonetic song-snippets. Other spreads distort perspective, stylize form, and celebrate the collage medium for itself, with torn-paper confetti representing leaves and clouds. Bailey herself is a paper-white cutout in patterned blue-and-white clothing, visually linked to birds and sky.
A good introduction to an important pathfinder among women naturalists. (biographical note, birds in crisis, resources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64896-050-5
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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