A pleasant-enough gathering, with some bright spots.
Verses on diverse topics, to read fast or slow, loud or low, to audiences of one or many.
Coelho writes in such a casual, loose-jointed style that even a poem written to demonstrate how “rhyming words really pop!” forcibly yokes “stars” with “far” and “snows” with “grow.” He kits each short poem or group of poems with largely interchangeable performance suggestions, from “Start softly and finish LOUD. This is called crescendo!” to (for a choral presentation) an unhelpful “try reading some lines together and some lines separately.” The typography is likewise generic, as all the poems are printed in the same size and, except for bolded homophones in one about the experiences of a “Chilly Chili,” weight. Still, two scary entries—one featuring an unseen creature creeping up to whisper in your ear (“Don’t Look Now”), the other about unexpectedly coming upon a cave filled with human remains (“The Bones of Pampachiri”)—offer delicious chills that balance the lightheartedness of groups of riddles and tongue twisters. For visual exuberance, Gray-Barnett uses scribbly lines and garish colors to good effect, and children or other human figures, when they appear, seem a racially and ethnically diverse lot.
A pleasant-enough gathering, with some bright spots. (Picture book/poetry. 7-9)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4769-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A rewarding exploration of a common substance’s complex nature.
From hummocks and bummocks to frazil and floebergs, an introduction in poems and explanatory notes to ice’s many states and formations.
Gianferrari’s sonorous drifts of free verse are sometimes confusingly allusive on first reading—“Cat ice whorls / Swirl and twirl. / Brinicles sink, / Plume and bloom. // Pancake ice stacks / Smack and crack”—but make clearer sense after examining the illustrations and reading the extensive notes at the end. Readers who think ice in nature comes only in sheets, floating chunks, or icicles are in for an eye-opening experience as, in naturalistic vignettes and vistas, Chen depicts silky strands of hair ice around twigs and needle-thin spikes emerging from frozen ground; freezing seawater undergoing subtle color changes while crystallizing from “frazil” to “grease ice,” “nilas,” and ultimately free-floating sea ice; and, when temperatures rise, aging into “rotten” or “candle” ice before melting to begin the “ice cycle” again. Though the author neglects to note that water boils at 212 degrees only at sea level (and simplistically claims that it comes only in three states), she finishes off handsomely, listing types of terrestrial and marine ice (of which “new” sea ice alone has seven); explaining how floebits, floebergs, brash ice, and growlers are distinguished by their size ranges; defining numerous other special terms; then closing with leads to books, videos, and science projects. Bundled-up human figures in the pictures are rare and small but do show variations in skin color. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A rewarding exploration of a common substance’s complex nature. (Informational picture book/poetry. 7-9)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72843-660-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
Playfulness and pedagogy intertwined.
A dog and a child joyously demonstrate gravity, friction, inertia, and other physical phenomena.
With an eye to her STEM-centric theme, Peters outfits her free-verse romps with titular references to physics and parenthetical identifications of relevant topics or principles—so that, for instance, in “Extra Electrons #2 (Electricity),” “My generous dog / gives me electrons / on cool, dry days” by rolling on a carpet until she is “excessively negative” and then bestowing a nose kiss: “Zap!” Likewise, digging claws into a carpet at bathtime and then escaping when soaped and slick demonstrate friction and its lack; zooming down a playground slide shows gravity in action; and if the poet mentions only three stages of matter in “Phase-Crazy Dog” (“My amazing dog / is like a Gas / whenever she chases flies. / She leaps! She jumps! / She’s everywhere at once!”), she does hint that there are others in the expansive set of notes on each poem at the end. In exuberantly drawn sketches, Bloch places a hyperactive canine of indeterminate breed and a dark-skinned child of ambiguous gender with a lighter-skinned Aunty Rosa as caregiver amid stars or jagged lines and other indicators of motion or energy flow. The final entry leaves physics behind for a loving “Paradox”: “My cosmic dog and I / are just / specks / in outer space,” but “we are in the center / of our universe.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Playfulness and pedagogy intertwined. (Picture-book poetry/science. 7-9)Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-63592-527-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Wordsong/Astra Books for Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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