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NATURE IS A SCULPTOR

Name: NATURE IS A SCULPTOR
Author: Heather Ferranti Kinser
ISBN: 9781728477190

WEATHERING AND EROSION

by Heather Ferranti Kinser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2023

An impressive STEM read-aloud.

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Admire nature’s awesome artistry.

The author of a book of microscopic images—Small Matters (2020)—turns to nature on a much larger scale here. Combining stunning stock photographs with rhythmic, poetic lines, Kinser has created a work that will have readers and listeners eager to travel to national parks and protected areas around the world. She shows and tells how—through weathering, erosion, and deposition—water, ice, and wind create amazing natural features such as Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, California, and a hoodoo in Goblin Valley State Park, Utah. Further afield, she includes photographs of Split Apple Rock, just offshore in New Zealand, and amazing rock striations created by the Russell Glacier in Greenland. The verse contains rhymes and a pleasing repetition of vowel sounds; the rhythm is steady and inexorable—appropriate to the long-term processes it describes. The language is filled with active verbs (“etches, scrapes, and carves,” “shapes and shaves”) and apt figurative language—ice is compared to a “grinder,” and a windstorm is referred to as a “rugged file.” Through both words and images, Kinser makes unfamiliar formation names like tafone easy to understand. The backmatter includes more detail about processes as well as a glossary. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An impressive STEM read-aloud. (further reading, websites) (Informational picture book. 5-9)

Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023

ISBN: 9781728477190

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner

Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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

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ODE TO GRAPEFRUIT
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

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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)