The wondrous natural world of Monterey Bay includes a huge submarine canyon and kelp forest bordered by ever-changing sand hills, tide pools and welcoming estuary. This inviting introduction works on two levels. Quiet alliterative text accompanies gorgeous color photographs illustrating the beauty of the bay and its intriguing occupants for lap-sitting listeners the age of the children pictured on the title page and at the beginning and end. Sidebars add additional text and photographs—captioned in notes at the end—for an older child or the adult reader. (These notes would be more useful if the pages were numbered.) In words and pictures the author-illustrator presents a selection of the marine mammals, invertebrates and seabirds young visitors might encounter. Important concepts, including keystone species, erosion by wind and waves and the uniqueness of different habitats, are embedded in the well-written text. The attractive format and judicious selection make this an excellent choice for nature lovers in any part of the country. (Picture book/nonfiction. 4-10)
Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-06062-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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Coco, who loves her gentle friend Bear, is shocked to learn that the other forest animals do not know about his kindness.
Inspired by one of her grandmother’s favorite maxims, Coco, a girl with light brown skin and curly brown hair, works with Bear to “share some kindness [and] bring some light” to the other animals in the forest. Interpreting it literally, the two make cookies (kindness) and lanterns (light) to share with the other animals. They trek through the snow-covered forest to deliver their gifts, but no one trusts Bear enough to accept them. As night begins to fall, Bear and Coco head home with the lanterns and cookies. On the way through the quiet forest, they hear a small voice pleading for help; it’s Baby Deer, stuck in the snow. They help free him, and Bear gives the young one a ride home on his back. When the other animals see both that Baby Deer is safe and that Bear is responsible for this, they begin to recognize all the wonderful things about Bear that they had not noticed before. The episode is weak on backstory—how did Coco and Bear become friends? Why don’t the animals know Bear better by now?—but Stott’s delicately inked and colored illustrations offer beguiling views of lightly anthropomorphized woodland critters that make it easy to move past these stumbling blocks. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 67% of actual size.)
Lit with sweetness. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-6238-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2020
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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Hee haw.
10
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The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 29, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S ANIMALS
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