Vivid glimpses of what waits for anyone who is willing to stop just looking and go.
A stirring invitation to leap, dive, soar, plunge and thrill to the natural world’s wonders and glories.
“Right outside your window there’s a world to explore,” writes Kerley. “Ready?” In huge, bright, sharply focused photos, a hang glider and a mountain climber dangle in midair, a paleontologist carefully brushes dirt off a fossil, an astronaut dangles near the International Space Station, and spelunkers clamber amid spectacular crystals. These dramatic images mingle with equally eye-filling scenes of muddy, soaked, laughing young children—some venturing alone down a forest path or over jumbles of rock, others peering into a snow cave or a starry sky. “Size things up,” suggests the author. “Get a firm grip. Then… / …start climbing.” This may well leave safety-obsessed parents with the vapors, but that may be all to the good. Explanatory captions for several of the photographs, from very brief profiles of the explorers to the stories behind the photos themselves, appear at the end.
Vivid glimpses of what waits for anyone who is willing to stop just looking and go. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4263-1114-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
An engaging mix of gentle behavior modeling and inventive story ideas that may well provide just the push needed to get some...
With a little help from his audience, a young storyteller gets over a solid case of writer’s block in this engaging debut.
Despite the (sometimes creatively spelled) examples produced by all his classmates and the teacher’s assertion that “Stories are everywhere!” Ralph can’t get past putting his name at the top of his paper. One day, lying under the desk in despair, he remembers finding an inchworm in the park. That’s all he has, though, until his classmates’ questions—“Did it feel squishy?” “Did your mom let you keep it?” “Did you name it?”—open the floodgates for a rousing yarn featuring an interloping toddler, a broad comic turn and a dramatic rescue. Hanlon illustrates the episode with childlike scenes done in transparent colors, featuring friendly-looking children with big smiles and widely spaced button eyes. The narrative text is printed in standard type, but the children’s dialogue is rendered in hand-lettered printing within speech balloons. The episode is enhanced with a page of elementary writing tips and the tantalizing titles of his many subsequent stories (“When I Ate Too Much Spaghetti,” “The Scariest Hamster,” “When the Librarian Yelled Really Loud at Me,” etc.) on the back endpapers.
An engaging mix of gentle behavior modeling and inventive story ideas that may well provide just the push needed to get some budding young writers off and running. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0761461807
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Amazon Children's Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated...
The master of the manic patterned tale offers a newly buffed version of his first published book, with appropriately gloppy new illustrations.
Like the previous four iterations (orig. 1979; revised 2004, 2006, 2009), the plot remains intact through minor changes in wording: Each time young Jule Ann ventures outside in clean clothes, a nefarious mud puddle leaps out of a tree or off the roof to get her “completely all over muddy” and necessitate a vigorous parental scrubbing. Petricic gives the amorphous mud monster a particularly tarry look and texture in his scribbly, high-energy cartoon scenes. It's a formidable opponent, but the two bars of smelly soap that the resourceful child at last chucks at her attacker splatter it over the page and send it sputtering into permanent retreat.
Score one for cleanliness. Like (almost) all Munsch, funny as it stands but even better read aloud, with lots of exaggerated sound effects. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55451-427-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Annick Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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