Staggering.
Kelsey and Kim’s latest brings author and illustrator together to spark conversations about an ineffable, arduous subject: death.
Scientifically sound and philosophically profound, Kelsey’s spare, graceful first-person text directly addresses a dying dearest while Kim’s visuals provide insights from fellow life-forms’ mourning rituals. Readers may watch through tears as elephants support the frail with tusk and trunk, whales lift their loved ones to the ocean’s surface for a final breath, and chimps lay the ailing down to groom their hair. Forthright, euphemism-free language refreshes: These animals are indeed dying, and it’s wise to acknowledge this fact. As life leaves the body, readers bear witness to howler monkeys crying out, hyenas sorrowfully cuddling, and gorillas silently tending to their beloved’s final moments. Suspended from fishing wire in wooden frames, Kim’s ink-and-watercolor illustrations are suffused with softest blacks and deepest blues, luxuriant greens and gentle magentas. Each diorama relies on illusions of depth to balance intricately detailed cutouts with stark backgrounds. Soon, mourners gather as a community. Orcas, elephants, and chimps assemble in a splendid spiral to pay respects while magpies and elephants place flowers and leaves as tokens of their affection. Eventually, melancholy melts into a sensitive celebration of the life cycle as bodies decompose and serve as staging grounds for new beginnings; “our lives plant a long line of love in this wild, thriving planet.”
Staggering. (author’s note, website) (Informational picture book. 5-12)Pub Date: April 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77147-364-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many.
Young Raina is 9 when she throws up for the first time that she remembers, due to a stomach bug. Even a year later, when she is in fifth grade, she fears getting sick.
Raina begins having regular stomachaches that keep her home from school. She worries about sharing food with her friends and eating certain kinds of foods, afraid of getting sick or food poisoning. Raina’s mother enrolls her in therapy. At first Raina isn’t sure about seeing a therapist, but over time she develops healthy coping mechanisms to deal with her stress and anxiety. Her therapist helps her learn to ground herself and relax, and in turn she teaches her classmates for a school project. Amping up the green, wavy lines to evoke Raina’s nausea, Telgemeier brilliantly produces extremely accurate visual representations of stress and anxiety. Thought bubbles surround Raina in some panels, crowding her with anxious “what if”s, while in others her negative self-talk appears to be literally crushing her. Even as she copes with anxiety disorder and what is eventually diagnosed as mild irritable bowel syndrome, she experiences the typical stresses of school life, going from cheer to panic in the blink of an eye. Raina is white, and her classmates are diverse; one best friend is Korean American.
With young readers diagnosed with anxiety in ever increasing numbers, this book offers a necessary mirror to many. (Graphic memoir. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-85251-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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