An unusual anatomy book combines familiar children's terms for bodily functions—pee, poop, snot, etc.—with accurate, relatively simple explanations of their roles.
Using amusing, cartoon-y watercolor illustrations and a couple of paragraphs of text per page, the book provides correct terminology for the kid-familiar terms. It undercuts itself, however: Telling readers the proper word for snot is nasal mucus, the work then returns to using the colloquial term instead. This retreat into the vernacular feels gimmicky, since other complex words are freely employed, including esophagus, carbohydrate and bacteria. Many pages feature "Fun Facts," such as that newborn babies cry without tears and that lips lack sweat glands. Each spread has a brief piece of advice called "Doctor Says." The doctor advises readers not to pick their noses: "It looks gross, and you can spread germs by using that finger to touch objects other people are likely to use." At only 24 pages, this effort is brief in the extreme and fails to include any suggestions for further reading, a bibliography, an index or a table of contents, although it does have a glossary. Other books in the Body Works series cover pain, growth and bodily noises: My Achy Body, My Stretchy Body and My Noisy Body. While it provides accurate information on topics that should appeal to curious school-age readers, this work's reliance on the limited shock value of colloquial terminology seems inappropriate for the intended audience. (Nonfiction. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-77049-202-8
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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