Boiling down content from his more comprehensive Constellations: Stars and Stories (2001), Sasaki presents scattershot references to mythological tales from various cultures associated with 11 constellations, which are depicted in heavily mannered portraits festooned with jagged, fingernail-sized, un-labeled glow-in-the-dark stars. Like nature, Flinn abhors a vacuum, filling background star fields with abstract swirls, spirals, color changes and geometric shapes around puppet-like figures that range from a charging Taurus to lounging representations of Andromeda and Cassiopeia. Though closing with a trio of doable craft projects, this is more a novelty item than a useful guide to the storied heavens—and in a darkened room less like the real thing than the illustrations in C.E. Thompson’s Glow In The Dark Constellations: A Field Guide For Young Stargazers (1989) or Nicholas Harris’s Glow In The Dark Book Of Space (2002). (Nonfiction. 7-9)
Pub Date: June 28, 2006
ISBN: 1-4027-0385-6
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
The Pumpkin Book (32 pp.; $16.95; Sept. 15; 0-8234-1465-5): From seed to vine and blossom to table, Gibbons traces the growth cycle of everyone’s favorite autumn symbol—the pumpkin. Meticulous drawings detail the transformation of tiny seeds to the colorful gourds that appear at roadside stands and stores in the fall. Directions for planting a pumpkin patch, carving a jack-o’-lantern, and drying the seeds give young gardeners the instructions they need to grow and enjoy their own golden globes. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8234-1465-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1999
Who is next in the ocean food chain? Pallotta has a surprising answer in this picture book glimpse of one curious boy. Danny, fascinated by plankton, takes his dory and rows out into the ocean, where he sees shrimp eating those plankton, fish sand eels eating shrimp, mackerel eating fish sand eels, bluefish chasing mackerel, tuna after bluefish, and killer whales after tuna. When an enormous humpbacked whale arrives on the scene, Danny’s dory tips over and he has to swim for a large rock or become—he worries’someone’s lunch. Surreal acrylic illustrations in vivid blues and red extend the story of a small boy, a small boat, and a vast ocean, in which the laws of the food chain are paramount. That the boy has been bathtub-bound during this entire imaginative foray doesn’t diminish the suspense, and the facts Pallotta presents are solidly researched. A charming fish tale about the one—the boy—that got away. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-88106-075-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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