by Roland Harvey & illustrated by Roland Harvey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2006
Harvey offers a set of aerial beach scenes for less maniacal Where’s Waldo? fans to pore over, featuring several dozen tiny vacationers sunning themselves, playing in the sand, visiting the nearby hamlet or generally mucking about. The views are linked by a series of inset, chatty postcards from the children of one family. They bear, along with casual mentions of cricket games and the Southern Cross, UFOs and sea monsters, references to some of the more amusing goings-on visible to viewers with sharp eyes: “Mr. McIntosh was chased by a shark. It must have been scared off by the taste of his shorts. And I saw a bird drop a poo on a kid’s hand.” Pair this read-between-the-lines tale with such similar epistolary outings as Jerdine Nolen’s Plantzilla Goes To Camp, illustrated by David Catrow (March 2006) or the granddaddy of them all, Alan Sherman and Lou Busch’s Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter From Camp), illustrated by Jack E. Davis (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-74114-412-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 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
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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier
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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali
by Dan Yaccarino & illustrated by Dan Yaccarino ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2009
This second early biography of Cousteau in a year echoes Jennifer Berne’s Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau (2008), illustrated by Eric Puybaret, in offering visuals that are more fanciful than informational, but also complements it with a focus less on the early life of the explorer and eco-activist than on his later inventions and achievements. In full-bleed scenes that are often segmented and kaleidoscopic, Yaccarino sets his hook-nosed subject amid shoals of Impressionistic fish and other marine images, rendered in multiple layers of thinly applied, imaginatively colored paint. His customarily sharp, geometric lines take on the wavy translucence of undersea shapes with a little bit of help from the airbrush. Along with tracing Cousteau’s undersea career from his first, life-changing, pair of goggles and the later aqualung to his minisub Sea Flea, the author pays tribute to his revolutionary film and TV work, and his later efforts to call attention to the effects of pollution. Cousteau’s enduring fascination with the sea comes through clearly, and can’t help sparking similar feelings in readers. (chronology, source list) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-85573-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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