Rosenstock and Roy’s collaboration celebrates scientific teamwork and an exciting first in deep-sea exploration.
Otis Barton and Will Beebe, unified in their scientific curiosity about the deep sea, team up to innovate the 5,000-pound bathysphere, making history in 1930 with their initial 800-foot dive.
The younger of the two, Barton sought out the famous explorer Beebe, correcting his prototypical calculations and sharing his own design. Rosenstock provides physical and logistical details, including how the two tall men fit themselves into a bolted-shut globe “the size of a tiny closet.” The narrative focuses on the drama, delivering bursts of information throughout the descent, as the crew above periodically halts progress to check the bathysphere’s cables. “300 feet. Stop. / ‘We’re leaking!’ Otis cried. A trickle seeped through the hatch door….Would a tiny leak stop?” At 800 feet, a double gatefold opens to the bathysphere, dwarfed by the expanse of ink-blue sea, its searchlight illuminating thick schools of fish, squid, and jellies. (The choice of a horizontal instead of vertical gatefold composition sidesteps an opportunity to visually dramatize the dangerous descent.) Roy’s multimedia paintings deliver plenty of contrasts, from boyhood scenes to events aboard the ship and undersea; endpapers depict creatures that dwell at several different ocean depths. Barton and Beebe are white; Roy depicts several male brown-skinned crew members and one white female research assistant.
Rosenstock and Roy’s collaboration celebrates scientific teamwork and an exciting first in deep-sea exploration. (author’s note, illustrator’s note, historical note, sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39382-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston...
A memorable, lyrical reverse-chronological walk through the life of an American icon.
In free verse, Cline-Ransome narrates the life of Harriet Tubman, starting and ending with a train ride Tubman takes as an old woman. “But before wrinkles formed / and her eyes failed,” Tubman could walk tirelessly under a starlit sky. Cline-Ransome then describes the array of roles Tubman played throughout her life, including suffragist, abolitionist, Union spy, and conductor on the Underground Railroad. By framing the story around a literal train ride, the Ransomes juxtapose the privilege of traveling by rail against Harriet’s earlier modes of travel, when she repeatedly ran for her life. Racism still abounds, however, for she rides in a segregated train. While the text introduces readers to the details of Tubman’s life, Ransome’s use of watercolor—such a striking departure from his oil illustrations in many of his other picture books—reveals Tubman’s humanity, determination, drive, and hope. Ransome’s lavishly detailed and expansive double-page spreads situate young readers in each time and place as the text takes them further into the past.
A picture book more than worthy of sharing the shelf with Alan Schroeder and Jerry Pinkney’s Minty (1996) and Carole Boston Weatherford and Kadir Nelson’s Moses (2006). (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2047-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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