This mix of narrative fact and anthropomorphized visual fancy fails to add up.
Borstlap examines the roles that microbes play everywhere on Earth and touches on their potential for solving human-created problems like plastic waste.
Initial double-page spreads focus on the microscopic size and wide-ranging distribution of microbes throughout the planet. “They live on your body and on every imaginable thing throughout the world…and they can even live 3 miles (5 km) below the earth.” A clunky analogy posits that “if we could fit all the people on Earth into a single teacup,… / …we would need a big container for all the world’s microbes!” Highly stylized illustrations fail to redeem this vagueness(possibly due in part to the uncredited translation from French), presenting the “container” as a large rectangular box decorated with confettilike splotches. More effective spreads pair arresting facts with the capricious, cartoonlike graphics. Microbes can “create families in less than an hour.” (A digital timer clocks 59 minutes above a microbe “family” peppered with wailing offspring.) Some microbes can feed on metal: Borstlap illustrates this fact with a series of toothy mouths chomping on nuts and bolts. Readers visit the cross-sectioned colon of a human (on a toilet, with a cellphone) and glean a bit about microbes’ roles in food production, natural recycling, and prospects for sustainable energy and plastics production. The complex language in eight concluding pages of factual material contrasts markedly with the text’s up-tempo tone. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
This mix of narrative fact and anthropomorphized visual fancy fails to add up. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-3-7913-7497-0
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Prestel
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An in-depth and visually pleasing look at one of the most fundamental forces in the universe.
An introduction to gravity.
The book opens with the most iconic demonstration of gravity, an apple falling. Throughout, Herz tackles both huge concepts—how gravity compresses atoms to form stars and how black holes pull all kinds of matter toward them—and more concrete ones: how gravity allows you to jump up and then come back down to the ground. Gravity narrates in spare yet lyrical verse, explaining how it creates planets and compresses atoms and comparing itself to a hug. “My embrace is tight enough that you don’t float like a balloon, but loose enough that you can run and leap and play.” Gravity personifies itself at times: “I am stubborn—the bigger things are, the harder I pull.” Beautiful illustrations depict swirling planets and black holes alongside racially diverse children playing, running, and jumping, all thanks to gravity. Thorough backmatter discusses how Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity and explains Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. While at times Herz’s explanations may be a bit too technical for some readers, burgeoning scientists will be drawn in.
An in-depth and visually pleasing look at one of the most fundamental forces in the universe. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668936849
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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