Light on informational payload but a blast for display or demonstration.
A lunar flyby, with notes on our largest satellite’s origins, phases, and tidal effects enhanced by pop-ups.
As in its predecessor, Pop-Up Earth (2021), paper engineer Charbonnel’s 3-D constructs are showstoppers that make the narrative text and the flat illustrations come off as afterthoughts. Still, though author Jankéliowitch leaves special terms like umbra and penumbra undefined, she does cover lunar basics (including comparisons with select moons orbiting other planets) in simple language. Similarly, if the human faces are White in all but one of illustrator Buxton’s scenes, her maps and diagrammatic views of the moon as it orbits between the sun and Earth are clean and easy to understand. As the final spread on the Apollo missions includes no mention of later developments, readers will come away uninformed of current plans for return visits, which is a shame. Still, after taking ganders at the huge planetary collision at the opening, the astronaut waving through the large clear plastic screen of an antique TV from the moon’s surface at the close, and the spectacular constructs in between, they may well be tempted into the orbit of Elaine Scott’s Our Moon (2016) to find out the full story.
Light on informational payload but a blast for display or demonstration. (Informational pop-up picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-500-65186-5
Page Count: 18
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Disappointingly lackadaisical.
Punctuated—unsurprisingly—by explosions, an account of the groundbreaking rocketeer’s childhood and first experiments.
Fueled by an early interest in hands-on science nurtured by his parents and sparked by reading The War of the Worlds, Goddard’s ambition to “build something that would soar to space” led to years of experimentation and failure analysis. Finally, in 1926, a brief but successful flight pointed the way to “every shuttle that has blasted into space, every astronaut who has defied gravity, and every man who has walked on the moon.” Fulton occasionally skimps on scientific details (in one childhood trial Robert “emptied a small vial of hydrogen into a pan”; even in the backmatter, there’s no explanation why, as he notes in his journal, “Hydrogen and oxygen when combined near a flame will ignite”). Still, she highlights the profound curiosity and determined, methodical effort that ultimately earned her subject a well-deserved place in the pantheon of scientists and inventors. Scientific gear in Funck’s cartoon illustrations often looks generic, and in one scene he depicts a rocket that is markedly different from the one described in the adjacent narrative. Moreover, his explosions look like fried eggs, and most come with oddly undersized if all-capped onomatopoeia (“BOOM!”; “POP!”) that underplays both the melodramatic potential and the real danger to which Goddard must have exposed himself. Goddard and his family are white.
Disappointingly lackadaisical. (afterword, list of sources) (Picture book/biography. 7-9)Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6098-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
Does help to clarify a trendy pedagogical concept, but in a catch-as-catch-can manner.
A broad sampler of STEAM-related topics and areas.
Five cartoon icons representing the titular “team” usher younger readers through a series of loosely related single-spread surveys, beginning with the universe and solar system and ending with the internet and robots. In between they touch on our planet’s weather and (changing) climate, simple machines, bridges, arithmetic, the human brain, and 25 other select subjects. The presentation barrages younger readers with basic snippets of fact, printed in various type sizes and weights. They can usually be read in any order as they are all fitted into a brightly colored jumble of digitally painted elements and cutout photos. Human figures are rare but, where large enough to tell, are racially diverse. Though there is only one obvious misprint (“Light travels nearly 6 million miles (10 trillion km) a year”), the sheer range of topics here makes hope of finding any of them treated systematically chimerical. So it is, for instance, that “ordinal” numbers are defined but not “cardinal” ones, only three of the four common states of matter make the cut, and senses beyond the traditional five are ignored beyond repeated mentions that they exist. Also, aside from the occasional suggestion to paint a rainbow or a toucan’s beak, STEAM’s “A” (for “Art”) is largely along for the ride, and along with a lack of leads to further information about any of the contents, the backmatter’s closing glossary and index are, at best, inadequate.
Does help to clarify a trendy pedagogical concept, but in a catch-as-catch-can manner. (Nonfiction. 7-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4654-6851-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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