Bursting with verdure and pollinators, a gentle love letter to late bloomers emphasizing the beauty of biodiversity.
A seedling flourishes in her own time, with some loving support along the way.
Teckentrup’s newest picture book details the tranquil story of a misfit plant finding her path to the sunlight. Straightforward, lilting text describes a little plant’s growth from delicate seedling to “the happiest summer plant there could be” after winding her way through the “tall and straight” spring and summer undergrowth of a northern temperate meadow, helped along by a loving community of insects and field mice. Under the patient care and encouragement of Ant and Ladybird, the shoot is encouraged, twining in and out amid the other plants, while allowed to grow in her own time, and her own way, until she is “full of love and life.” The author’s richly textured, luminous illustrations draw on seasonal color palettes and varying compositions to carry readers through the life cycle of the unspeaking protagonist. Lightly stylized to suggest cut-paper collage, the semirealistic depictions of butterflies, bees, and songbirds are recognizable while remaining poetic. A sweet ode to taking one’s time to find the right place to blossom, the story comes to its zenith with a warm, vertical double-page spread showing the no-longer-little plant in full bloom, fluttering with life and glowing under a hazy, late-summer sun.
Bursting with verdure and pollinators, a gentle love letter to late bloomers emphasizing the beauty of biodiversity. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-3-7913-7429-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Prestel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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 Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be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
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
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