Like many oral folktales, the stories meander, but here the craft is also in perfect synchrony with its content: “Good...
A lyrical, dreamy picture storybook of five interlocking outings among the Kadar adivasi (indigenous) community in the Anamalai hills in southern India.
The Kadar tribes were historically nomadic hunter-gatherers, but 40 years ago, according to the authors’ note, they were “forced to live in small permanent settlements at the edges of [the] forests”; today, they act as guides to tourists and traders who want to traverse their lands. Researchers Ramesh and Chandi spent hours with tribal elders, and the result is this magical collection, exquisitely illustrated by Frame. The stories are mostly narrated by Madiyappan, a Kadar elder, as well as his uncle, Krishnan, and his cousin Padma. They guide the narrator, presumably an urban visitor, through a dramatic and philosophical forest walk: “Paths have character: there are easy ones, challenging ones, unforgiving ones, one that encourage you to walk with a steady swinging rhythm and other that tease your stride with odd twists and turns,” Madiyappan says. The book introduces the hills’ and forests’ flora and fauna—bison, monkeys, hornbills—and uses Indigenous words unapologetically, although many can be deciphered in context or found in the book’s short glossary.
Like many oral folktales, the stories meander, but here the craft is also in perfect synchrony with its content: “Good forest people are curious,” says Padma. “We constantly explore.” (Folktales. 8-12)Pub Date: April 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-93-83145-60-7
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Tara Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Lots of science and a little story—but it’s an uneasy mix.
Along with an injured little brown bat, readers meet over a dozen other bat species and learn all about bat behavior.
The plotline and the pedagogy are largely unintegrated, and they often battle on the page for attention. Signaled by a change of background color, rows and boxes of information about bat anatomy, flight, diet, echolocation, research, and other topics shoehorn themselves arbitrarily into the bat protagonist’s disastrous encounter with a group of desert tourists and subsequent stay at a veterinary hospital. As his broken wing heals, he meets other bats from around the world (“Namaste” says an Indian flying fox. “And ’ello lil mate! Whaddya they call ya?” greets a fruit bat from Australia) who are likewise injured or disabled. By the time his wing is healed, he’s learned to accept differences in others, and readers have learned not only how bats live, but how to coexist with them. Koch piles on a reading list along with information about bat careers and shelters at the end. In her neatly drawn illustrations, the bats are diverse in appearance, but aside from some children in classroom settings, the vet and most other human figures are light-skinned.
Lots of science and a little story—but it’s an uneasy mix. (Graphic informational fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-409-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
The genesis of world-rocking inventions is often mysterious; their fate upon people not so much, here given a tantalizing if...
Helfand brings a propulsive optimism to this graphic account of the Industrial Revolution.
Meet Johann Gutenberg, thinking, thinking, thinking big. “What if instead of copying text one word at a time… / …there was a way to reproduce entire pages?” Scribes took five years to copy the Bible. Helfand doesn’t mention the beauty of their work, but Gutenberg’s invention was revolutionary: more people received more news and knowledge. Readers follow Kumar’s clean panels as James Watt makes his entrance, then Eli Whitney, John Kay, Robert Fulton, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford. Helfand is mostly interested in the mechanical wizardry and tenacity of these inventers, which is slippery to capture: “About four times as much steel could be produced with Bessemer’s technique.” Helfand digs the book’s grave by half-heartedly tackling the social consequences. Readers learn that “countless skilled weavers suddenly found themselves out of work,” which is shrugged off: “But the inventions that cost the weavers their jobs were few and far between.” Except “as large landowners snatched up more and more farmland, small farmers found themselves out of work and eager for factory jobs.” Except: “Men and women were operating like clockwork; as efficiently as the machines that dominated the industrial age. The only problem was… / Ford’s employees hated it.”
The genesis of world-rocking inventions is often mysterious; their fate upon people not so much, here given a tantalizing if garbled peek, then left unexplored. (Graphic nonfiction. 9-12)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-93-81182-28-4
Page Count: 92
Publisher: Campfire
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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