Engaging and informative.
A text that explores diversity in birds.
This appealing title showcases some of the most obvious adaptations that differentiate bird species, including size, feet, flight, nests, eggs, hatchlings, beaks, and vocalizations, each in a spread or two. A concluding spread summarizes these adaptations and adds the range of colors, obvious throughout Anderson’s careful collage portraits. She introduces topics in large text using occasional rhyming couplets, internal rhymes, alliteration, and frequent repetition of the phrase “so many ways.” Each spread includes examples, with dozens of labeled species. The birds may be familiar or unfamiliar, but the information will be intriguing—robins have three toes in front and one in back to hold on to a branch while perching; woodpeckers cling to trees with two toes each in front and back; the common murre’s egg is tapered so that it can only roll in a circle, not off the cliff where it was laid. The egg is shown on a spread of variously sized, shaped, and colored eggs, some of which are “wee as a pea.” The narrative reads aloud smoothly, and the illustrations show well. Readers who are also knowledgeable birders will appreciate the way every bird, identified or not, is recognizable. For young readers or browsers, the two-level text offers flexibility. Accurate and interesting facts and imagery will make this a positive addition to readers’ nature collections.
Engaging and informative. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781595729927
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Star Bright
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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