A promising premise sloppily handled.
A guessing game for readers who are a little hazy on the differences between turtles and tortoises, dolphins and porpoises, and other often confused animal cousins.
“Croc or gator? Be a sleuth. / Guess who grins from tooth to tooth?” Not only are several of Jameson’s supposed clues—for telling hares from rabbits, for instance, or bees from wasps and hornets—just as obscure as that one, but some of the solutions on following spreads will leave young nature detectives as perplexed as they were before. Scobie’s cartoon crocodile actually leaves multiple teeth exposed when its jaws are closed, not just the “fourth” one the author specifies. Nor, the way the illustrator angles the two side-by-side reptiles, are the differences in their snouts (another distinction Jameson mentions) visible. The rest of the presentation is similarly phoned in; it seems unlikely that even very young children will ever confuse arbitrary pairings like puffins and penguins, the titular alpaca is shown not in full but only from chin up and really looks more like a sheep than a llama, and a teaser image of a toad leaping off a lily pad (“Frog or toad now hopping in?”) is just cheating given that toads don’t actually live in ponds. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A promising premise sloppily handled. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780762478781
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Running Press Kids
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
Enticing and eco-friendly.
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)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap.
Budding naturalists who dug We Dig Worms! (2015) will, well, coo over this similarly enlightening accolade.
A curmudgeonly park visitor’s “They’re RATS with wings!” sparks spirited rejoinders from a racially diverse flock of children wearing full-body bird outfits, who swoop down to deliver a mess of pigeon facts. Along with being related to the dodo, “rock doves” fly faster than a car, mate for life, have been crossbred into all sorts of “fancies,” inspired Pablo Picasso to name his daughter “Paloma” in their honor, can be eaten (“Tastes like chicken”), and, like penguins and flamingos, create “pigeon milk” in their crops for their hatchlings. Painted on light blue art paper—“the kind,” writes McCloskey in his afterword, “used by Picasso”—expertly depicted pigeons of diverse breeds common and fancy strut their stuff, with views of the children and other wild creatures, plus occasional helpful labels, interspersed. In the chastened parkgoer’s eyes, as in those of the newly independent readers to whom this is aimed, the often maligned birds are “wonderful.” Cue a fresh set of costumed children on the final page, gearing up to set him straight on squirrels.
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap. (Graphic informational early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935179-93-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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