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I WANT TO BE A SCIENTIST

Name: I WANT TO BE A SCIENTIST
Author: Laura Driscoll
ISBN: 9780062989659

From the I Can Read! series

by Laura Driscoll ; illustrated by Catalina Echeverri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 20, 2024

An informative and accessible child’s-eye view of STEM careers.

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Aspiring young scientists, take heed!

Traveling on a ship to the North Pole would seem an adventure in itself, but the young, unnamed narrator, whose mother heads up a team of marine biologists, also gets to meet eight other scientists involved in other specialties. On almost every page of this early reader, we encounter someone engaged in different fieldwork: a hydrologist, a microbiologist, a geologist, a seismologist, a climate scientist, a meteorologist, a zoologist, and an astronomer. As the narrator thinks about careers in science, more specialty roles—botanist, epidemiologist, and physicist—are added to the list. The work of these scientists is clearly and simply explained. (Appended is a short list with descriptions of 10 specialties.) The unfussy illustrations are washed in glowing colors, with many shades of blue; when snow forms the background, the scientists’ bright jackets pop. The ship itself is a fire-engine red. Beginners might need help reading or pronouncing some of the researchers’ special fields, but overall this is an engaging introduction to a wide and important area of work. The scientists include men and women and are racially diverse. The narrator and Mom are light-skinned; the child uses crutches.

An informative and accessible child’s-eye view of STEM careers. (Early reader/nonfiction. 4-8)

Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024

ISBN: 9780062989659

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
I WANT TO BE AN ARTIST
by Laura Driscoll ; illustrated by Catalina Echeverri

- BOOK REVIEW
LITTLE PENGUIN’S NEW FRIEND
by Laura Driscoll ; illustrated by Tadgh Bentley

- BOOK REVIEW
PROJECT POPCORN
by Laura Driscoll ; illustrated by Shirley Ng-Benitez

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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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ANIMAL ARCHITECTS

From the Amazing Animals series

by Amy Cherrix ; illustrated by Chris Sasaki ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.

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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)