An unpalatable mess left half-baked by an ill-conceived gimmick.
Modeling a classic nursery song, a black hole does what a black hole does.
Ferrie reverses the song’s customary little-to-large order and shows frequent disregard for such niceties as actual rhymes and regular metrics. Also playing fast and loose with internal logic, she tracks a black hole as it cumulatively chows down, Pac-Man–style, on the entire universe, then galaxies (“It left quite a cavity after swallowing that galaxy”), stars, planets, cells, molecules, atoms, neutrons, and finally the ultimate: “There was a black hole that swallowed a quark. / That’s all there was. / And now it’s dark.” Then, in a twist that limits the audience for this feature to aging hippies and collectors of psychedelic posters, the author enjoins viewers to turn a black light (not supplied) onto the pages and flip back through for “an entirely different story.” What that might be, or even whether a filtered light source would work as well as a UV bulb, is left to anybody’s guess. The black hole and most of its victims sport roly-poly bodies and comically dismayed expressions in Batori’s cartoon illustrations—the universe in its entirety goes undepicted, unsurprisingly, and the quark never does appear, in the visible spectrum at least. This anthropomorphization adds a slapstick element that does nothing to pull the physics and the premise together.
An unpalatable mess left half-baked by an ill-conceived gimmick. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8077-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Too glib for comfort.
A picture-book biography of Englishwoman Evelyn Cheesman emphasizes her perseverance in a man’s world during a particularly male-oriented era.
The first verso shows three light-skinned girls in pinafores, their activities demonstrating that girls in the 1880s were expected to be “quiet, clean, and covered with lace.” As with all the art, color and composition are appealing, but the humans are bland and one-dimensional. The text goes on to say that girls were certainly banned from “bug hunts.” On the facing page, a soiled little girl kneels in a forest glade, dragonfly on forefinger. The text reads, “But Evelyn went anyway.” That mantra is repeated when, years later, she becomes the first woman to run the London Zoo’s insect house; the third time involves world travel as an insect-collecting woman. Its fourth repetition unabashedly introduces the uncomfortable fact of colonialism. On the Pacific island of Nuku Hiva, the white woman stands in her standard outfit of crisp white shirt and safari hat, facing “villagers”—five brown-skinned people with grass skirts and spears—who tell her not to climb a steep cliff. “But Evelyn went anyway.” She is eventually recognized by Queen Elizabeth II for, among other things, “discover[ing] new species” in other populated parts of the empire. Perhaps it is by way of apology that further notes on Cheesman appear after an interview with contemporary female entomologist Alexandra Harmon-Threatt, who is African American.
Too glib for comfort. (endnotes, bibliography.) (Biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-943147-66-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: The Innovation Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A dud rocket.
Astronauts train, ride a Soyuz rocket up a slider to the International Space Station, then return to Earth when their mission is done.
This introduction is so sketchy that the narrative and the pictures differ on the actual number of astronauts involved, and the captions offer a mix of specific facts and fragmentary filler (“The third stage includes an engine”; “The spacesuit provides oxygen for breathing”). Nevertheless, this quick overview of a generic visit to the ISS does reflect both the international character of space missions (at least currently) and the diversity of modern flight crews. Aside from the sliding Soyuz, there are only two small pop-ups, but each of the five openings features cut or folded flaps with additional information or inside views beneath. Along with simply drawn spacecraft and technical gear, Peintre casts a mixed crew of men and women, mostly light skinned but some with darker skin and/or puffy hair. Though individualized, they seem to be just interchangeable place holders, as in one scene the same figure appears twice. The interactive effects are larger and more varied in the co-published Savannah Animals, also by Dussaussois but illustrated by Aurélie Verdon.
A dud rocket. (Informational novelty. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 979-1-02760-703-7
Page Count: 14
Publisher: Twirl/Chronicle
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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