Sketchy, but required reading for anyone who thinks that milk only comes from mammals.
Readers who believe that the popular beverage is solely an animal product are udderly mistaken, as this refreshing overview demonstrates.
Starr and Andrya begin with a gallery of milk-producing creatures, from cows to camels, found everywhere from wild forests to deserts and dairy farms. The survey continues on to rice paddies, fields of oats and soybeans, jungle trees laden with cashews, an orchard of almond trees, and finally coconut groves near sandy beaches. It all serves to underscore what a trip to any grocery store’s dairy section proves—that vegan, vegetarian, and lactose-free alternatives to cow’s milk are widely available now. The subtitle is misleading, since the book lacks information about how these milks are actually “made” except for vague references to pressing and squeezing (for cows) or stripping and threshing (for rice). Aside from glimpses of kitchen blenders and a squeeze bag dripping milk made from nuts, the illustrations are likewise unhelpful. A partial recap at the end that includes additional entries for donkey, moose, water buffalo, and reindeer milk does offer brief comments on each type’s distinctive uses or nutritional value. In Andrya’s pictures, stylized human figures with understated signs of racial and cultural diversity pose in outdoor settings at work or quaffing milk from large glasses with every evidence of satisfaction. “Gulp, gulp, gulp! Ahhh, Milk!”
Sketchy, but required reading for anyone who thinks that milk only comes from mammals. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781957655512
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Gnome Road Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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
An ideal lead-in to more specific guides to aquarium setup and fish care.
A first introduction to our planet’s finny residents, particularly the decidedly uncommon goldfish.
Preceded by an entire piscatorial ABC that extends over six pages, two children of color lecture an audience of house pets (and readers) about such typical fishy features as scales and gills—properly noting that some fish, like certain eels, have no scales and some, like hagfish, no bony spines. The two then zero in on goldfish, explaining that they are easier to keep at home than tropical fish, originated long ago in China, can recognize the faces of people who bring them food, and with proper care live 25 years. All of this information is presented in a mix of dialogue balloons and single lines of commentary in block letters, accompanying cleanly drawn cartoon illustrations that alternate between a domestic setting and labeled portraits of various fish rendered in fine, exact detail. With easily digestible doses of biological and historical background, common-sense cautionary notes, and a buoyant tone, this is an appealing dive for newly independent readers out to enhance the household menagerie.
An ideal lead-in to more specific guides to aquarium setup and fish care. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943145-15-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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