A young newcomer to the frozen north sees the northern lights for the first time and hears the Inuit legend associated with them.
Awed and frightened by the sweeping trails of green and pink in the sky, Leslie starts to whistle—and is frantically shushed by her friend Oolipika, who explains that, according to her grandmother, the lights are Anirniit, spirits, playing a game with a walrus skull, and the sound will draw them dangerously close. Ghostly figures chase a nebulous “ball” across starlit skies bright with shimmering curtains of light in Zhao’s atmospheric illustrations, and Mallory caps her matter-of-fact descriptions of two girls playing in the snow and then standing, awestruck, to view the show with a poetic flight: “Sometimes green, sometimes red, / the night sky dances….” A following final note on what science has to say about the aurora’s causes brings the encounter to an informative if prosaic close.
A touch bland, but a glimpse at least of the phenomenon’s visual wonders and a widely told bit of related folklore. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-7722-7004-4
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Inhabit Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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A pro bono Twinkie of a book invites readers to fly off in a magic plane to bring clean water to our planet’s oceans, deserts, and brown children.
Following a confusingly phrased suggestion beneath a soft-focus world map to “touch the Earth. Now touch where you live,” a shake of the volume transforms it into a plane with eyes and feathered wings that flies with the press of a flat, gray “button” painted onto the page. Pressing like buttons along the journey releases a gush of fresh water from the ground—and later, illogically, provides a filtration device that changes water “from yucky to clean”—for thirsty groups of smiling, brown-skinned people. At other stops, a tap on the button will “help irrigate the desert,” and touching floating bottles and other debris in the ocean supposedly makes it all disappear so the fish can return. The 20 children Coh places on a globe toward the end are varied of skin tone, but three of the four young saviors she plants in the flier’s cockpit as audience stand-ins are white. The closing poem isn’t so openly parochial, though it seldom rises above vague feel-good sentiments: “Love the Earth, the moon and sun. / All the children can be one.”
“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so easy to clean the place up and give everyone a drink? (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2083-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
Heart (-shaped surface feature) literally broken by its demotion from planet status, Pluto glumly conducts readers on a tour of the solar system.
You’d be bummed, too. Angrily rejecting the suggestions of “mean scientists” from Earth that “ice dwarf” or “plutoid” might serve as well (“Would you like to be called humanoid?”), Pluto drifts out of the Kuiper Belt to lead readers past the so-called “real” planets in succession. All sport faces with googly eyes in Keller’s bright illustrations, and distinct personalities, too—but also actual physical characteristics (“Neptune is pretty icy. And gassy. I’m not being mean, he just is”) that are supplemented by pages of “fun facts” at the end. Having fended off Saturn’s flirtation, endured Jupiter’s stormy reception (“Keep OFF THE GAS!”) and relentless mockery from the asteroids, and given Earth the cold shoulder, Pluto at last takes the sympathetic suggestion of Venus and Mercury to talk to the Sun. “She’s pretty bright.” A (what else?) warm welcome, plus our local star’s comforting reminders that every celestial body is unique (though “people talk about Uranus for reasons I don’t really want to get into”), and anyway, scientists are still arguing the matter because that’s what “science” is all about, mend Pluto’s heart at last: “Whatever I’m called, I’ll always be PLUTO!”
Hurray for the underdog. (afterword) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1453-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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