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SAFE CROSSING

Name: SAFE CROSSING
Author: Kari Percival
ISBN: 9781797214566

by Kari Percival ; illustrated by Kari Percival ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 2025

Informative and beautiful.

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A community helps amphibians cross nighttime roads.

In spring, when frost thaws and rain arrives, amphibians such as spring peepers and salamanders begin their journey from woods to the vernal pools where they’ll spawn. That perilous journey involves crossing roads as vehicles whoosh past. Enter the Amphibian Migration Team—volunteers who stand at these crossings at night to monitor traffic and help “our tiny friends” to safely cross “a wet road on a wet night in spring.” As citizen scientists, the volunteers also count survivors and casualties. Percival chronicles this process in unadorned prose through the eyes of one multiracial family, who not only volunteer, but also advocate for the creation of a wildlife tunnel to allow the creatures safe passage beneath the road. The Black-presenting child who narrates emerges as a hero, asking questions packed with answers. “Do they hear the other frogs singing and think, Tonight is the night! It’s time to go down to the pool to lay our jelly eggs safely in the water!” The explanatory part of the story—the making of a toad tunnel, from design to budget to town council approval—offers readers a road map. At times the narration slips into more telling than showing, but the illustrations, rendered digitally but in the style of woodcut prints, are spectacular. Spreads saturated with nighttime purples, browns, and yellows riven with beams from headlamps fill the page, while charming, illustrated bubbles pop up alongside the child’s head.

Informative and beautiful. (more information on amphibians and wildlife-crossing structures, safety guidelines, guidance on being a community scientist, glossary, “can you find” visual search game) (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025

ISBN: 9781797214566

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Chronicle Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: today

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
HOW TO SAY HELLO TO A WORM
by Kari Percival ; illustrated by Kari Percival

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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

- BOOK REVIEW
ODE TO GRAPEFRUIT
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

- BOOK REVIEW
WE MOVE THE WORLD
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)