Glimpses of a teeming, colorful world just beneath the surface, enhanced by a bit of cleverly designed hide-and-seek.
A quick dive into the world’s five oceans. Bring a flashlight.
The torch (or any source of light) is for revealing hidden details in the painted marine scenes, each of which is backed on the verso by white images placed on a solid black background so they will shine through when lit from the rear. The focus here is on oceanic wildlife, beginning with a narwhal taking a breather at an Arctic ice hole and darting on to show puffins diving on a silvery shoal of herring, an anglerfish snagging an unwary shrimp in the deep Atlantic, and residents of the Great Barrier Reef, hydrothermal vents, a shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, and open waters in general. Along with answers to prompts (“What has made this thick, inky cloud?”), Brown offers additional facts about the locale or the creatures in view in simply phrased sentences at each stop (“When in danger, [an octopus] squirts out ink, then makes a quick getaway while it can’t be seen”), amplified at the end by further brief comments. If the gallery is limited in size and cogent topics like pollution and environmental change go unaddressed, still this may leave younger readers primed for deeper plunges. There are no human figures.
Glimpses of a teeming, colorful world just beneath the surface, enhanced by a bit of cleverly designed hide-and-seek. (map) (Informational novelty. 6-8)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68464-288-5
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
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
BOOK REVIEW
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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