Nicely produced and balanced in its instructive approach.
When a giant elephant arrives as a birthday present for the prime minister of Han, his 6-year-old prodigy son, Cao Chong, orchestrates a plan to measure the beast’s weight.
Amazed by its size, spectators begin to place wagers on the elephant’s enormous weight. But without a scale large enough and strong enough to withstand the animal’s hefty mass, a challenge is presented to the prime minister’s advisers. Much deliberation ensues, and when a suggestion to slice the elephant into smaller pieces to fit on a regular scale is made, Chong intervenes with a more clever and ingenious plan. The mathematical puzzle is deftly explained in a story based on ancient Chinese history. Chong places the elephant in a boat, marks a water line on the outside of the boat, replaces the elephant with as many rocks as needed to lower the boat to the same water level and combines the principal of buoyancy with the total volume of rocks to calculate the elephant’s weight. Black-outlined colorful paintings provide a lush backdrop for the story’s circa–200 C.E. China setting, with royal characters in long robes and bejeweled crowns. An addendum includes well-defined activities for understanding buoyancy and scale measurement, a succinct history and geography of the Han Dynasty, and a biography of Cao Chong.
Nicely produced and balanced in its instructive approach. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62855-903-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Arbordale Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses.
An NBA star pays tribute to the influence of his grandfather.
In the same vein as his Long Shot (2009), illustrated by Frank Morrison, this latest from Paul prioritizes values and character: “My granddad Papa Chilly had dreams that came true,” he writes, “so maybe if I listen and watch him, / mine will too.” So it is that the wide-eyed Black child in the simply drawn illustrations rises early to get to the playground hoops before anyone else, watches his elder working hard and respecting others, hears him cheering along with the rest of the family from the stands during games, and recalls in a prose afterword that his grandfather wasn’t one to lecture but taught by example. Paul mentions in both the text and the backmatter that Papa Chilly was the first African American to own a service station in North Carolina (his presumed dream) but not that he was killed in a robbery, which has the effect of keeping the overall tone positive and the instructional content one-dimensional. Figures in the pictures are mostly dark-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Blandly inspirational fare made to evoke equally shrink-wrapped responses. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-81003-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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