Broad of scope but parochially Eurocentric in style and vision.
A cornucopia of retold myths and fables gathered from every inhabited continent.
With quaint disregard for rigorous authenticity, McAllister draws largely on old public-domain sources written for general audiences (most of which she helpfully cites at the end) for these 50 tales, tones down overtly violent incidents, and delivers animal-centered episodes that are stylistically similar no matter their (purported) ethnic or regional origins. Looking a bit crammed-in thanks to small type and narrow line spacing, the one- to four-page entries mix familiar stories such as “The Three Little Pigs” (featuring a brick-laying sow named Curly and a wolf who runs away singed but alive) and “The Elephant and the Blind Men” with some semifamiliar entries like “The Bear Prince”—ascribed to “Mexico” but actually reading like a version of the European “Bearskin” with a coyote shoehorned in—and a variety of lower-profile trickster and pourquoi tales. These include why cheetahs have tear tracks beneath their eyes, why pandas are black and white, why warthogs are ugly, and why bears have stumpy tails. In flat, folk-art–style compositions the Romanian-born illustrator scatters a broad variety of small realistic or anthropomorphic animals over stylized landscapes and interior scenes with human figures that are diverse of skin color and facial features but clad in likewise stylized generic national dress.
Broad of scope but parochially Eurocentric in style and vision. (Folk tales. 9-11)Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78603-045-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thrilling reading for budding biologists.
Here’s blood in your eye.
Along with the ever popular hagfish (aka “snot eel”) and the horned lizard—which can indeed squirt blood from one or both eyes—Johnson (Zombie Makers: True Stories of Nature’s Undead, 2012, etc.) profiles 10 animals with particularly noxious defense mechanisms. Likewise introducing researchers who have helped to provide “the science behind the story,” she explains the nature of each defense and, in simple but specific language, the biology that makes it work. Large color photos feature a mix of portrait views and close-ups of relevant body parts, to which spatters of blood and dripping ichor on each page add melodramatic visual motifs. This is an outstanding way for readers to meet scientists at work in both field and lab, as well as to learn that, for instance, fulmar chicks can project vomit up to 6 feet and, creepily, that a school of the Amazonian two-spot astyanax will attack and eject one of its own to distract an approaching predator.
Thrilling reading for budding biologists. (source notes, multimedia resource lists) (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: June 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4677-2109-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
A browser’s delight, despite lowering the bar considerably for publishable poetry.
From Alexander the Great’s steed Bucephalus to Dolly the sheep and the first Shamu, a gallery of animals that have played roles, large or small, in human history.
Modeled on the collaborators’ previous Presidential Pets (2012), each of the chronologically ordered entries features a full-page cartoon caricature opposite a mix of at least marginally relevant facts (“Horses sleep both lying down and standing up”) and observations that feel more like filler than anything else. “Josephine changed her name from Rose because Napoleon didn’t like it,” reads one in the piece on a dog that fished Napoleon Bonaparte out of the Mediterranean; “Leonardo never married or had children,” reads another on Leonardo da Vinci’s propensity for freeing caged birds. Also as in Pets, Moberg introduces each chosen creature in verse that ranges from inane to merely laughably inept: Spotting penguins in South America, “Magellan was surprised / That creatures used to snow / Also liked the sun / And life as Latinos!” Some passages are printed over brightly colored backgrounds and so are hard to read. Furthermore, the author provides no sources whatsoever. Still, fans of Keltie Thomas’ Animals That Changed the World (2010) will find new creatures aplenty here, along with the familiar likes of Balto, Koko and Punxsutawney Phil.
A browser’s delight, despite lowering the bar considerably for publishable poetry. (Nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62354-048-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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