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LIGHT SPEAKS

Name: LIGHT SPEAKS
Author: Christine Layton
ISBN: 9780884489245

by Christine Layton ; illustrated by Luciana Navarro Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023

Though the text is less than illuminating, the gorgeous visuals help shed light on the topic.

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An homage to light.

This sparklingly illustrated picture book consists of spare, poetic verse exploring the properties of light; however, it’s often too impenetrable for easy understanding (“light laughs in code, / signals in signs…”). Luckily, the book concludes with two pages of scientific context for some of the more cryptic phrases. For instance, Layton explains that the statement “Light tells the space between stars. / It echoes off planets and moons” means that we can see planets and moons—which do not generate their own light—in the night sky because light reflects off them from stars. While the idea of using poetry to celebrate light is an intriguing one, the abstruse verse and in-depth scientific explanations seem geared toward an older audience than the illustrations. The images are the stars of the show, making rich use of color to convey the idea of a shimmering universe. They offer some grounding to the esoteric narrative and present their own secondary storyline in which brown-skinned children (including one wheelchair user) observe light all around them as they shine flashlights at each other, cower from lightning during a storm, and gleefully capture fireflies. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Though the text is less than illuminating, the gorgeous visuals help shed light on the topic. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: April 4, 2023

ISBN: 9780884489245

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Tilbury House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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BUTT OR FACE?

by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

A gleeful game for budding naturalists.

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
ODE TO GRAPEFRUIT
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

- BOOK REVIEW
WE MOVE THE WORLD
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

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ANIMAL ARCHITECTS

From the Amazing Animals series

by Amy Cherrix ; illustrated by Chris Sasaki ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.

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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)