Readers will surely pay closer attention on nature walks.
Wise and Evans explore the many types of houses animals build.
Wise creates the fictional Fin & Claw Village to introduce five diverse children (and readers) to animal homes. Wearing hard hats and carrying flashlights, the five crawl through tunnels made by mound termites underneath the tallest structure made by animals. Living in a honeybee colony would be sweet, but the bedrooms are awfully small and hot. Other species introduced include tree squirrels, red groupers, chimpanzees, grey foam-nest tree frogs, satin bowerbirds, polar bears, alligators, pack rats, and beavers. One quick sentence on each spread is followed by a paragraph in a smaller font that gives more information; these focus on keeping kids’ attention and are often humorous. Straight facts are presented at the back. A final question asks readers what sort of house they might make; a Literacy Connection section provides teachers with lesson ideas, including a STEAM activity to extend on that question. Backmatter sorts fact from fiction for readers, especially with regard to the illustrations: Homes depicted are child-sized, but their builders are proportionate to the kids, and the habitats are accurately portrayed on the individual spreads, if not in the endpaper map of the village. Small details delight, from the amusing mailboxes to the visual clues pointing to previous and future species. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9-by-22-inch double-page spreads viewed at 29% of actual size.)
Readers will surely pay closer attention on nature walks. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-58469-677-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dawn Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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