Stellar artwork mismatched with weak rhyming verse.
The A Day In… series expands with these snapshots of animal life throughout an entire day in a forested wetland.
Neidigh’s incredibly detailed, realistic illustrations, all double-page spreads, are the real draw here, giving kids up-close views of the animals: the delicate wings of a darner as it captures a mosquito, each leg sporting tiny hairs; a fish’s individual scales; the brown bat’s fearsome-looking teeth. Many of the animals are hunting and/or catching prey; the bobcat carries a rabbit to her kittens. Unfortunately, Kurtz’s text is not a good complement. The rhyme and rhythm frequently seem forced and off. “It’s sunrise in the wetland. / A woodpecker flies from a tree. / She just brought her children breakfast. / They never stop feeling hungry.” A caddisfly’s (nonbifurcated) case is referred to as “armored pants” to rhyme with “plants,” and peepers’ song is compared to the sound of jingle bells. Not all the vocabulary introduced in the text is defined in context (“snag,” “larval,” “mandible”), but other opportunities are bypassed (it explains echolocation without ever using the word); there is no glossary. Backmatter introduces the concept of a keystone species (here a beaver), compares and contrasts the four types of wetlands, and asks readers to identify animals in an illustration from their descriptions. Answers are right-side-up at page bottoms. A Spanish-language edition publishes simultaneously in paperback.
Stellar artwork mismatched with weak rhyming verse. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 4-9)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62855-912-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Arbordale Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
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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