An underwhelming account of a compelling conservationist.
On the banks of a river in northeastern India, a boy planted a forest.
In 1979, the Brahmaputra River flooded the island of Majuli. Jadav Payeng, a tribal boy, saw many water snakes wash up on the shore; with no trees for shelter, they died. Jadav asked his community for help planting trees. In response, they handed him a bag of seedlings and told him to do the work himself. After years of hard work, he turned a scattering of bamboo seedlings into a thriving forest that supported myriad tree species and became home to a variety of animals and birds. While tigers, rhinos, rabbits, and foxes enjoyed the fruits of his labor, humans were less enthusiastic, especially when a herd of elephants migrating through the newly planted jungle destroyed a village. Eventually, Jadav found a way to balance the needs of the humans, the wild creatures, and the river, which is now kept safe from flooding by a sturdy wall of trees. Jadav’s courage, strength, and dedication make him a fascinating protagonist, and the lush, painterly illustrations are lovely. However, the writing often feels lackluster, and the lack of additional context renders the narrative less exciting than it might otherwise have been—it’s not until the backmatter, for instance, that we learn that Jadav's work went unnoticed by most others until 2009, when a photographer happened upon the forest. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An underwhelming account of a compelling conservationist. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7358-4505-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: NorthSouth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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