The perfect choice to inspire young readers and listeners, with just the right amount of detail to inspire, entrance, and...
“It was dawn when the chorus began.”
As a child, Rachel Carson awoke to a symphony of birds, and she listened, watched, and wrote as other animals joined in. Innovative, appealing illustrations show Rachel in comic-book panels, vignettes, and full- and double-page spreads as she explores, observes, and deeply appreciates nature. A profusion of dialogue balloons reproduces the vocalizations of the animals around her. As a student, Rachel intends to write but instead focuses on the microscopic world in a drop of water, which in turn leads to underwater scientific study and, later, well-received books about the sea. However, it’s when she realizes that the symphony she loves has grown quiet—effectively represented by both the absence of sound bubbles and negative-space outlines of creatures now disappeared—that she makes her greatest contribution by revealing the destruction caused by pesticides in her book Silent Spring, which contributed to the formation of the EPA and the environmental movement. Resilience and dedication are strong underlying themes here; relevant details, such as her mother’s background in music, are seamlessly incorporated; and while the focus understandably stays on her work—her overwhelming success as an activist and scientist in a field dominated by men goes unmentioned—there is certainly room for outside discussion. Carson and her family are white; people of color appear in scenes depicting her impact.
The perfect choice to inspire young readers and listeners, with just the right amount of detail to inspire, entrance, and encourage further investigation. (notes, bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62672-819-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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