AN ADVENTURE THROUGH THE WATER CYCLE WITH DRIP THE RAINDROP

An anthropomorphized raindrop leads readers on a simplified trip through the water cycle.

On the first page, narrator Drip’s pictured as a raindrop with big eyes, smiling mouth, and skinny arms; their journey begins on the next spread in a puddle as they wait for the sun to come out and warm the water. Ghostlike, Drip rises into the air, looking down on all the activity below. Drip joins other “H₂O friends” in a cloud as they all form raindrops again and fall during a storm. Drip falls into a mountain stream and then lands back in their puddle before the whole thing starts over again. Moyers’ format and subject don’t always mesh, the cutesy rhyming verses and bouncy meter sometimes forcing word choices that oversimplify the process and/or make it difficult to use solid scientific terms: “Just as I thought, / the puddle gets hot / and up into the air I go! // Now I’m water vapor! / I’m lighter than paper / in a process called evaporation.” Astrella’s animation-inspired scenes look three-dimensional, Drip especially standing out against the backdrop. Backmatter includes a prose summary of other adventures Drip might have within the water cycle (for example, transpiration, groundwater flow), a glossary, and two activities (cloud in a bottle and an evaporation experiment).

Not a solid choice for science learning.