Entertaining and modestly informative.
When danger looms, plants get tough.
Silver offers a companion book to Mighty Scared: The Amazing Ways Animals Defend Themselves (2024), introducing readers to plant defenses, the fiercer the better. From roses with sharp prickles (distinguished from thorns in the glossary) to invasive hydrillas, aquatic plants that keep sunlight from the fish beneath, she highlights 13 species whose defenses she finds “cool and courageous.” She covers stinking corpse flowers, exploding pods on touch-me-not balsams, and Venus flytraps, with their snapping jaws. On each spread, she examines a different plant, providing a short expository paragraph describing its defense, a “fierce fact,” and a slangy “Get To Know Me” section narrated by the plant. The actual information is rather skimpy and occasionally inaccurate. Silver doesn’t always note where these plants can be found. She notes that poison ivy vines grow between one and four feet tall, when in fact they can grow up into the tree canopy. And while a diagram refers to the clear liquid in coconuts as milk, it’s in fact water (milk is made from the flesh). McLaughlin’s bright and lively digital illustrations depict all the plants on the opening spread. At times, the artwork personifies both flora and fauna, to readers’ delight. Diverse humans can be seen interacting with the plants. A final spread compares some of these defenses with ways that humans protect themselves, though the examples are a bit of a stretch.
Entertaining and modestly informative. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781459837973
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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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