More science-y than scientific, this encyclopedic effort is ideal for quiet browsing and family sharing.
Emulating its predecessor Creaturepedia (2015) in format and whimsy, Barman’s latest exerts a quirky organization upon more than 600 plants.
In 49 alphabetically arranged sections of three to six pages each, plants are grouped by color, size, habitat, and even smell. “The Confused Fruits”—cucumber, eggplant, and zucchini among them—“think they’re vegetables” (each contains seeds, a characteristic of fruit). Illustrating “The Healers,” people in medieval clothing proffer branches of Saint-John’s-wort (for “mild depression”) or sip lemon-balm tea (for calming nerves). “The Old Timers” groups trees known for their longevity—olive, ginkgo, giant sequoia—inserting tortoises, dinosaurs, and crocs for fun. With a few exceptions (echinacea, for instance) the plants are identified by their common names. The sparse text offers facts, lore, and brief definitions. The focus here is on Barman’s wry, bright, inventive digital compositions, which yield both a stylized fidelity to plant forms and goofy visual jokes. “Garden vegetables” depicts root, leaf, and seed crops along with a mole gleefully terrifying nearby earthworms. With the exception of several ancient Egyptians, two brown-skinned people sniffing fragrant blossoms, and three brown hands reaching toward “prickly” plants, the cartoonish humans appear to be white. There’s little regard for scale or specifically discrete geographical habitats—but that’s not Barman’s intention. In the appendix of leaf shapes, information about the margins and veins of leaves appears, bafflingly, to be missing.
More science-y than scientific, this encyclopedic effort is ideal for quiet browsing and family sharing. (contents, index) (Nonfiction. 5-8)Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78603-139-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Wide Eyed Editions
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Another “humerus” study in comparative anatomy.
A comparison of select human and dinosaur bones connects readers with some of our more ancient predecessors.
Continuing the approach of Bone by Bone (2013) and Tooth by Tooth (2016), Levine points up parallels between fossilized skulls, ribs, toes, and other skeletal features and those of modern readers as well as prehistoric frills, horns, and the like that we don’t happen to sport. Some of this she presents as easy posers: what sort of dino would you be if you both had a long neck and “your vertebrae didn’t stop at your rear end but kept going and going and going?” Diplodocus, perhaps, or, she properly notes on the ensuing double gatefold, another type of sauropod. What if you had two finger bones per hand rather than five? T. Rex! If your pinky bone grew tremendously long? A pterosaur! Just for fun, in the simple but anatomically careful illustrations, Spookytooth temporarily alters members of a cast of, mostly, brown-skinned young museumgoers (two wearing hijabs) to reflect the exaggerated lengths, sizes, or other adaptations certain bones underwent in dinosaurs and several other types of extinct reptiles. Generous lists of websites and other information sources follow a revelation (that won’t come as a surprise to confirmed dino fans) that birds are dinosaurs too.
Another “humerus” study in comparative anatomy. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4677-9489-3
Page Count: 38
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
There’s not much beyond the razzle-dazzle, but it’s got that in spades.
Intense hues light up a prehistoric parade.
It’s really all about the colors. The endpapers are twinned head-shot galleries captioned, in the front, with scientific names (“Tyrannosaurus rex”) and pronunciations and, in the rear, translations of same (“Tyrant Lizard King”). In between, Paul marches 18 labeled dinos—mostly one type per page or spread, all flat, white-eyed silhouettes posed (with occasional exceptions) facing the same way against inconspicuously stylized background. The text runs toward the trite: “Some dinosaurs were fast… / and other dinosaurs were slow.” But inspired by the fact that we know very little about how dinosaurs were decorated (according to a brief author’s note), Paul makes each page turn a visual flash. Going for saturated hues and vivid contrasts rather than complex patterns, he sets red-orange spikes like flames along the back of a mottled aquamarine Kentrosaurus, places a small purple-blue Compsognathus beneath a towering Supersaurus that glows like a blown ember, pairs a Giganotosaurus’ toothy head and crest in similarly lambent shades to a spotted green body, and outfits the rest of his cast in like finery. “Today you can see their bones at the museum,” he abruptly, inadequately, and simplistically concludes.
There’s not much beyond the razzle-dazzle, but it’s got that in spades. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6698-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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