Informative and breathtakingly beautiful.
The giant sequoia tree is a natural wonder inspiring awe with its immensity and grandeur.
Cooke explores the sequoia’s life cycle from a tiny seed through its amazing growth and longevity to its eventual collapse, when it releases seeds for a new beginning. Fires clear undergrowth and allow the seeds to scatter. When no fires occur, insects perform the same functions. Sequoias can eventually fall victim to their own size, collapsing and decomposing. These facts are made accessible via concrete comparisons that engage young readers’ imaginations. The sequoia’s height is equal to “three blue whales stacked chin to tail,” and it is “as heavy as three hundred elephants.” As narrator, Cooke speaks with earnestness and clarity while employing language and syntax that are poetic and filled with obvious love of these giants. Hsieh’s double-page–spread illustrations, done in gorgeous tones of browns, yellows, and greens, add a dreamlike element. The sequoia itself is depicted with careful accuracy and, like the properties of its colorful bark, always seems to glow in sunlight, firelight, or moonlight. Wildlife has its place in the forest habitat, with deer, birds, squirrels, and more appearing in their natural activities. Several humans also appear—a diverse group of children, including one who uses a wheelchair, along with an older woman figure—all tiny at the base of the tree as they admire it in wonder.
Informative and breathtakingly beautiful. (afterword) (Informational picture book. 5-9)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-930238-85-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Yosemite Conservancy
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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