Beautiful if not quite perfect.
Meet a few of the mostly North American animals that come out at night.
“Waking up. // Noisy pup. // Flutter high. // Gliding by.” The book works equally well for lap-sitters and older children since these rhyming verses accompany longer paragraphs about each species, here red foxes, gray wolves, bats (it appears to be a lesser long-nosed bat), and flying squirrels, respectively. Others include skunks, opossums, bullfrogs, fireflies, raccoons, owls (a barn owl is pictured), bobcats, and white-tail deer. (Of those, skunks and deer are more crepuscular than nocturnal, as are rabbits, one of which is pictured in the final spread.) The information presented covers food, habitat, family life, and adaptations. Highly detailed, sometimes–hyper-realistic illustrations bring these animals to life for readers, though the bright colors and high contrast don’t always make it clear that it’s nighttime. Three-quarters of each double-page spread is devoted to an up-close look at the animal, and the text, easy to read against the background, is usually decorated with a vignette illustration. Troublingly, the firefly page shows a child inspecting a closed jar of the insects, then a tipped-over jar as they fly away. The lid has no holes. A “For Creative Minds” section introduces further vocabulary and concepts and asks readers to sort several species accordingly. It also identifies several animal adaptations and challenges readers to match species to their eyeshine. A Spanish-language paperback edition, Sigilosos de la noche, publishes simultaneously.
Beautiful if not quite perfect. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60718-322-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Arbordale Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be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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