Children (and adults) who like unusual illustration styles will be entranced by these creatively depicted creatures....
This British import provides a brief introduction to the animal world with depictions of 12 different creatures in striking illustrations, with a short paragraph of description for each.
An arresting cover image portrays a springbok staring out at readers, with the animal’s body filled in with a scrap of flowered fabric and metallic gold highlights ornamenting its horns. The title is set in metallic gold letters, and touches of gold add highlights throughout. Enchanting illustrations are the book’s dominant feature, with a distinctive style combining pen and ink, watercolor washes, and fabric and wallpaper scraps. These disparate elements are used in combination to show swimming sea turtles with curious expressions, floating butterflies, and a school of smiling herring. Snow geese wear pink wallpaper patterns, and zebras appear with the usual black-and-white stripes as well as alternative patterns of polka dots and diamonds. There is no logical flow to the arrangement of the different animals, birds, fish, and insects, with a rather jarring effect as the environments move arbitrarily from water to land to air and back again. The text’s sentence length and vocabulary make this book suitable for school-age children, and the descriptions are composed of interesting snippets of information rather than a comprehensive overview.
Children (and adults) who like unusual illustration styles will be entranced by these creatively depicted creatures. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-5713-3068-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A bland also-ran trailing a large litter of like-themed pups.
A photo album of young wolves running, playing, and growing through their first year.
Light on factual details, the uncredited text largely runs to vague observations along the lines of the fact that “young wolves need to rest every now and then” or that packs “differ in size. Some are large and have many wolves, while others are small with only a few.” The chief draws here are the big, color, stock photos, which show pups of diverse ages and species, singly or in groups—running, posing alertly with parents or other adult wolves, eating (regurgitated food only, and that not visible), howling, patrolling, and snoozing as a seasonal round turns green meadows to snowy landscapes. In a notably perfunctory insertion squeezed onto the final spread, a wildlife biologist from the American Museum of Natural History introduces himself and describes his research work—all with animals other than wolves. Budding naturalists should have no trouble running down more nourishing fare, from Seymour Simon’s Wolves (1993) to Jonathan London’s Seasons of Little Wolf (illustrated by Jon Van Zyle, 2014) and on. Baby Dolphin’s First Swim follows the same formula even down to profiling exactly the same wildlife biologist.
A bland also-ran trailing a large litter of like-themed pups. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4549-2237-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
A rib-tickling gallery, anything but dry.
The inside stories on 10 creatures who can lay claim to bone-y extremes.
Framed as a “Who am I?” guessing game, the illustrations alternate simplified white skeletons on solid black backgrounds on rectos with, on those pages’ versos, painted views of the fleshed-out creatures featuring invisible but raised bones that can be felt. In accompanying clues and narratives in the voices of the creatures, Balkan makes much use of colorful comparisons and atypical but revealing units of measure: “Not counting my tail,” the Etruscan shrew (smallest bones) notes, “my SKELETON is the size of a paperclip and weighs less than a single raisin!” Likewise, thanks to having the largest mandible (i.e., bone of any sort), a blue whale boasts “I could fit one hundred of your friends on my tongue.” (“But don’t worry. I don’t eat humans.”) The author makes no bones about playing fast and loose with the premise, admitting that some “records” are speculative—which bird has the lightest bones? “Let’s not quibble,” responds the peregrine falcon—and slipping in a moot claim that the hammerhead shark has the “fewest bones” because its skeleton isn’t bone at all but cartilage. Still, as she points out at beginning and end, all of the bones here have human equivalents, and that connection should give both casual browsers and budding naturalists plenty to gnaw on.
A rib-tickling gallery, anything but dry. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7148-7512-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Phaidon
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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