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A YEAR IN NATURE

Name: A YEAR IN NATURE
Author: Hazel Maskell
ISBN: 978-1-78627-306-2

A CAROUSEL BOOK OF THE SEASONS

by Hazel Maskell ; illustrated by Eleanor Taylor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2018

An idyllic view of the conventional annual cycle.

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Trees leaf out and change color, wildflowers bloom, birds nest, and fawns and fox kits grow through a four-season round.

The hand of man never appears in Taylor’s deciduous dells, and they teem with wildlife for young viewers to spot. Maskell’s bland text, set in noodle-shaped captions, helps by pointing out highlights or setting easy challenges: “A woodpecker drums on a tree trunk calling for a mate”; “The leaves turn red, orange, and gold”; “Can you count 12 birds with yellow chests?” If the natural history is sometimes a bit vague (“Minibeasts live inside this tree trunk, and others creep up underneath”) and much of the flora and fauna goes unidentified, still the sylvan residents are at least naturalistically depicted. Also, though the woodland biome doesn’t change, each scene is slightly different, as though viewers were turning in place. The artist varies the quality of light from tableau to tableau as well, and the pop-up trees create tantalizing depths and shadows. The covers can be folded back and tied with a ribbon to create a turnable panorama. Most animals will be recognizable to residents of the temperate zones of North America despite the book’s European setting.

An idyllic view of the conventional annual cycle. (Informational pop-up novelty. 5-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-78627-306-2

Page Count: 8

Publisher: Laurence King

Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | 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

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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

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A PLACE FOR RAIN

by Michelle Schaub ; illustrated by Blanca Gómez ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

Enticing and eco-friendly.

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Why and how to make a rain garden.

Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.

Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)