by Buffy Silverman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 4, 2020
Crocus-poking, mud-luscious enjoyment.
Full-color photography and sparse, rhyming verse offer a look at early spring in a temperate climate.
Text, art, and layout are clever, thoughtful, and engaging. One double-page spread gives the beginning of a sentence that will have several different endings over the pages that follow; the sequence is repeated four times. The opening pages start with “On a drip-droppy, / slip-sloppy, / snow-melting day….” Each of those three descriptions is accompanied by a clear and beautiful stock photograph; contrasting black or white text over the photographs is large and legible. The pages that follow use rhyming couplets with their own photographs to end that preceding phrase: “Squirrels cuddle. / Snakes huddle. / Clouds break. / Salamanders wake.” Plants, animals, and human beings are all included in the signs of spring; children will relate strongly to soaked mittens, boots in puddles, melting snowmen, and swinging on a tire swing. A particularly stunning photograph shows a chickadee, wings whirring, sipping water from a dripping icicle. Explanations of this and all the early spring phenomena depicted are offered at the back of the book, extending the age level from preschool to early primary grades. The overall theme, as well as the creative use of noun-verb combinations to form new adjectives, also lends itself to introducing children to the e.e. cummings poem that begins “in Just-spring.” One photograph shows two humans, both presenting as white.
Crocus-poking, mud-luscious enjoyment. (glossary, further reading) (Informational picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5415-7813-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Millbrook/Lerner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
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by Andy Rash ; illustrated by Andy Rash ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2023
Sure to have readers booking their own trips to catch the next brief but memorable solar eclipse.
A total solar eclipse brings a father and son closer together.
After learning in school about the eclipse’s impending arrival, a curious young boy excitedly figures out the best time and place to see it. His father agrees to transport him to the woods to view the eclipse, and the child describes everything that happens at various points—two months before the eclipse, then a month, a week, a day, an hour, a minute, and the exciting second before the sun slips behind the moon. Time seems to stand still, and the creatures in the woods are baffled by what appears to be an early nightfall. Then the countdown begins again, with the boy describing what happens after the eclipse—one second, one minute, one hour, one day, one year, and even longer. The moment has become a shared memory that enhances the bond between father and son and inspires future eclipse-chasing expeditions. Based on the author’s actual experience with his own son in 2017, this picture book features lively, child-friendly digital artwork filled with scenes of nature, matter-of-fact text that acknowledges the awesomeness of this rare phenomenon, and useful maps that chart the solar eclipse of 2017 and projected paths for future eclipses. Father and son are light-skinned. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Sure to have readers booking their own trips to catch the next brief but memorable solar eclipse. (more information on eclipses) (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781338608823
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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by Caron Levis ; illustrated by Andy Rash
by Marion Dane Bauer ; illustrated by Ekua Holmes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
Wow.
Awards & Accolades
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Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2018
Coretta Scott King Book Award Winner
The stories of the births of the universe, the planet Earth, and a human child are told in this picture book.
Bauer begins with cosmic nothing: “In the dark / in the deep, deep dark / a speck floated / invisible as thought / weighty as God.” Her powerful words build the story of the creation of the universe, presenting the science in poetic free verse. First, the narrative tells of the creation of stars by the Big Bang, then the explosions of some of those stars, from which dust becomes the matter that coalesces into planets, then the creation of life on Earth: a “lucky planet…neither too far / nor too near…its yellow star…the Sun.” Holmes’ digitally assembled hand-marbled paper-collage illustrations perfectly pair with the text—in fact the words and illustrations become an inseparable whole, as together they both delineate and suggest—the former telling the story and the latter, with their swirling colors suggestive of vast cosmos, contributing the atmosphere. It’s a stunning achievement to present to readers the factual events that created the birth of the universe, the planet Earth, and life on Earth with such an expressive, powerful creativity of words paired with illustrations so evocative of the awe and magic of the cosmos. But then the story goes one brilliant step further and gives the birth of a child the same beginning, the same sense of magic, the same miracle.
Wow. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7883-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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by Marion Dane Bauer ; illustrated by Hari & Deepti
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by Marion Dane Bauer ; illustrated by Richard Jones
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