GOT GEOGRAPHY!
by Lee Bennett Hopkins & illustrated by Philip Stanton
“If I were the equator / I would have an attitude. / I’d boast the most about my no degrees of latitude,” writes Kathryn Madeline Allen in the third poem in Hopkins’s collection of 16 geography-related verses. Readers who experience a ripple of excitement when examining maps (“More than names / and colored dots”) will be the most taken by this far-reaching picture book, illustrated with wildly colorful, often perspective-tweaking paintings of Earth, maps, villages, volcanoes and explorers young and old. The subject of geography looms largest, but some poems examine forests (Grace Nichols’s “For Forest”), mountains (David Harrison’s “The Mountain”), the sea (an excerpt from Carl Sandburg’s “North Atlantic”), or the rumbling earth itself (Joan Bransfield Graham’s “Awesome Forces”). While the poems are eclectic enough, the geography theme gets a little old in a one-sitting read. Still, browsing armchair travelers may be inspired to grab their compasses and boldly go. (Poetry. 8-12)