Facts about chlorophyll combine with a sense of wonder.
Art and text move through summer, fall, winter, and spring to explain the science behind the seasonal changes in deciduous trees.
“What kinds of leaves do you see in the summer?” The opening double-page spread has a stark white background. Seventeen different trees are represented by a scattered array of leaves—each carefully labeled—in many gradations of green. The enticing collage art uses negative space to show the veins. The page turn leads to additional glorious art, affirming the text’s use of such words as “emerald” and “jade.” Lush canopies of summer leaves part just enough to reveal, in the distance, people and a dog paddling a red canoe across a lake. Although all the illustrations concentrate on tree leaves, they occasionally include similar scenes of seasonal human activities—subtle reminders that humans are also affected by nature’s cycles. The text uses some anthropomorphism (trees and/or their leaves conceal “secrets,” “wait,” “make food,” and sleep) as it introduces young readers to chloroplasts, chlorophyll, plant cells, and the process of photosynthesis as well as the role of fallen leaves in an ecosystem. After the final double-page spread, which reveals a world returned to springtime, there are two pages written in a straightforward, scientific manner, supplementing the earlier text with further information about leaves—including differentiation between deciduous trees and evergreens and the names and characteristics of pigments hidden beneath a leaf’s chlorophyll.
Facts about chlorophyll combine with a sense of wonder. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5415-2899-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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