Sun-dazzling!
Colorful photographs and short, rhyming phrases extol the glories of autumn in the Northeastern and Midwestern sections of the United States.
“On a gold-blooming, // bee-zooming, / sun-dazzling day….” Each of those phrases is in a bold white font against a different vibrant photograph of, for instance, goldenrod, a bee on a purple coneflower, and an autumn landscape bright with red and orange maple leaves. These are followed by more eye-catching photographs accompanied by pairs of rhyming, two-word, noun-verb combinations (“Crickets chirp. / Butterflies slurp”). The clever poetry pattern repeats several times, with the final page—still in two words—summing up the many parts. Excellent backmatter elaborates—in sequential order—on the various phrases, adding rudimentary scientific explanations of, for example, fall animal behaviors, photosynthesis, thunderstorms, and why breezes chill a human being’s skin. The book offers older students the opportunity to learn about word usage and try their hand at writing poetry that uses the text’s format. People appear in two photographs—in the first, a dark-haired, light-skinned family of four revels in apple-picking; in the second, which includes the poem’s penultimate line, a brown-skinned child hugs a dog in the midst of a pile of fallen leaves. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Sun-dazzling! (bibliography, glossary) (Informational picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72844-298-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wow.
The stories of the births of the universe, the planet Earth, and a human child are told in this picture book.
Bauer begins with cosmic nothing: “In the dark / in the deep, deep dark / a speck floated / invisible as thought / weighty as God.” Her powerful words build the story of the creation of the universe, presenting the science in poetic free verse. First, the narrative tells of the creation of stars by the Big Bang, then the explosions of some of those stars, from which dust becomes the matter that coalesces into planets, then the creation of life on Earth: a “lucky planet…neither too far / nor too near…its yellow star…the Sun.” Holmes’ digitally assembled hand-marbled paper-collage illustrations perfectly pair with the text—in fact the words and illustrations become an inseparable whole, as together they both delineate and suggest—the former telling the story and the latter, with their swirling colors suggestive of vast cosmos, contributing the atmosphere. It’s a stunning achievement to present to readers the factual events that created the birth of the universe, the planet Earth, and life on Earth with such an expressive, powerful creativity of words paired with illustrations so evocative of the awe and magic of the cosmos. But then the story goes one brilliant step further and gives the birth of a child the same beginning, the same sense of magic, the same miracle.
Wow. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7883-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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