Interactive fun that demonstrates that knowledge is the most rewarding treasure of all.
Searching for treasure exhumes much more than pieces of eight.
Brown-skinned Saksham and Zuri and an unnamed pale-skinned child referred to as “you” (a stand-in for readers) undertake a round-the-world journey, always just one step behind the ghost of the infamous pirate Captain Kidd, who’s apparently trying to purloin treasures “as revenge for the riches he lost all those years ago.” Their pursuit depends on the many convenient clues that Kidd has left for readers, providing motivation for aspiring map readers, code crackers, puzzle solvers, and inscription decipherers. Along the way, the children discover stories of both found and still-missing lost loot, including the Mona Lisa, the Viking ship Gokstad, India’s Sree Padmanabhaswamy Temple, and China’s Terracotta Army. The quest takes the indefatigable trio across the globe, digging up a fair amount of history on the way. Interspersing comics panels with captioned vignettes and full-page illustrations, Wright’s brightly detailed and watercolorlike images evoke the far-flung destinations. Despite some editorial lapses, this engaging and information-packed U.K. import offers plenty of visual excitement, including changes of perspective, time period, and composition. The protagonists unearth facts related to geography, history, paleontology, archeology, and cryptic communication during their journey. The revelation at the end might be somewhat of a letdown, but no treasures were harmed during this protracted hunt.
Interactive fun that demonstrates that knowledge is the most rewarding treasure of all. (code-breaking explanations; world map; introduction to orienteering, metal-detecting, and geocaching) (Nonfiction/activity book. 7-10)Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781623546298
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Shot through with vague generalities and paired to a mix of equally generic period images and static new art, this overview remorselessly sucks all the juice from its topic.
This survey of the growth of industries in this country from the Colonial period to the post–World War II era is written in the driest of textbook-ese: “Factories needed good transportation so that materials could reach them and so that materials could reach buyers”; “The metal iron is obtained by heating iron ore”; “In 1860, the North said that free men, not slaves, should do the work.” This text is supplemented by a jumble of narrative-overview blocks, boxed side observations and terse captions on each thematic spread. The design is packed with overlapping, misleadingly seamless and rarely differentiated mixes of small, heavily trimmed contemporary prints or (later) photos and drab reconstructions of workshop or factory scenes, along with pictures of significant inventions and technological innovations (which are, in several cases, reduced to background design elements). The single, tiny map has no identifying labels. Other new entries in the All About America series deal similarly with Explorers, Trappers, and Pioneers, A Nation of Immigrants and Stagecoaches and Railroads. Utilitarian, at best—but more likely to dim reader interest than kindle it. (index, timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6670-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.
Ehrlich renders an admiring portrait of Cather, focusing on the relationship between her writing and the places she lived and visited.
Willa and family followed her grandparents from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Willa was lonely, but she had a pony and freedom to roam. When her father traded farming for real estate, the family moved to Red Cloud. She read keenly, enjoying adult friends, who "were more interesting than children and...talked to Willa in a serious and cultured way." During her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an essay’s publication changed Willa's path from doctor to writer. Cather worked at magazines in Pittsburgh and New York. The writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to focus on her own writing. Journeys to Europe, the American Southwest, back to Nebraska and Virginia—all resonated in her accomplished fiction. Ehrlich writes with little inflection, sometimes adopting Cather's viewpoint. The Civil War and slavery are briefly treated. (Cather's maternal grandparents were slaveholders.) Native Americans receive only incidental mentions: that Red Cloud is named for the Oglala Lakota chief and that, as children, Willa and her brothers had "imagined themselves in Indian country in the Southwest desert. What adventures they would have!" Minor's watercolor-and-gouache pictures depict bucolic prairie scenes and town and city life; meadowlarks appear frequently.
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject. (timeline, thumbnail biographies of American women writers of Cather's time, bibliography) (Biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-689-86573-2
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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