A spirited road trip over land and sea, through the air, into space, and a bit beyond the present day.
A quick ramble through the history of transport, from camels and chariots to driverless cars.
Beginning with shank’s mare (“People simply walked”), Oxlade navigates his topic by transportation type: from a horse-drawn travois to big trucks and small sports cars, from steam trains to maglevs, log rafts to cruise ships, the Wright brothers’ Flyer to the International Space Station—with pauses along the way to take ganders at motorcycles, submersibles, helicopters, and hot air balloons. Though he sails past “caravels” and “carracks” without explaining their differences he does wheel out definitions for “penny-farthing” and “quad bike” (which American readers will recognize as an ATV), and he also gives passing nods to the Montgolfiers and other inventors. The figures in Haslam’s bright, cartoon illustrations tend toward caricatures, which fly a bit low with a stereotypically dressed Mexican man chasing a mule but generally add a pleasantly breezy air. Some of the bike riders, pilots, astronauts, and subway passengers have darker skin. The vehicles themselves are stylized but recognizable, which is a good thing because closing quizzes challenge viewers to identify 13 of them and to answer a set of questions too. The jacket folds out into a poster that depicts many of the modes of transit covered, with a submersible at the bottom and a futuristic rocket ship at the top.
A spirited road trip over land and sea, through the air, into space, and a bit beyond the present day. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68297-152-9
Page Count: 48
Publisher: QEB Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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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