Easy on the eyes, but more a showcase for collectors than a teaching tool.
A small alphabet of pop-up shapes, tidily packaged in a slipcase.
Alternating white forms on monochrome backgrounds with monochrome on white, the pop-ups—from a 3-D Apple to raised Yellow sweater with (nonworking) Zipper—accurately depict common items or scenes. For the most part, anyway—there are occasional inventive flights, as in an emphatically negatory concatenation of variously sized “NO”s representing those two letters. A few models feature moving parts, but in general McCarthy goes less for dazzling paper-engineering effects than for clean lines and neat compositions. Aside from an embossed, uncolored, single initial placed in an inconspicuous (sometimes nearly invisible) spot on each example, there are no identifiers or captions. This leads to opportunities for conversation. While the white Elephant is quite obvious, on the following page, three purple Flowers pop up over some blades of Grass—or maybe it’s a Garden? The large picture of a slice of orange on the carton of Juice will confuse more than one young reader. But most of the forms are probably too fragile for alphabet-learners anyway.
Easy on the eyes, but more a showcase for collectors than a teaching tool. (Pop-up alphabet. 4-6, adult)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9007-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick Studio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
Adults will do better skipping the book and talking with their children.
Social-equity themes are presented to children in ABC format.
Terms related to intersectional inequality, such as “class,” “gender,” “privilege,” “oppression,” “race,” and “sex,” as well as other topics important to social justice such as “feminism,” “human being,” “immigration,” “justice,” “kindness,” “multicultural,” “transgender,” “understanding,” and “value” are named and explained. There are 26 in all, one for each letter of the alphabet. Colorful two-page spreads with kid-friendly illustrations present each term. First the term is described: “Belief is when you are confident something exists even if you can’t see it. Lots of different beliefs fill the world, and no single belief is right for everyone.” On the facing page it concludes: “B is for BELIEF / Everyone has different beliefs.” It is hard to see who the intended audience for this little board book is. Babies and toddlers are busy learning the names for their body parts, familiar objects around them, and perhaps some basic feelings like happy, hungry, and sad; slightly older preschoolers will probably be bewildered by explanations such as: “A value is an expression of how to live a belief. A value can serve as a guide for how you behave around other human beings. / V is for VALUE / Live your beliefs out loud.”
Adults will do better skipping the book and talking with their children. (Board book. 4-6)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78603-742-8
Page Count: 52
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
A promising approach—but too underpowered to reach orbital velocity.
Young earthlings turn starry skies into playscapes in this first look at constellations.
On a page first glimpsed through a big die-cut hole in the front cover, Chagollan promises that stars “tell a thousand stories.” She goes on to describe brief scenarios in which residents of Earth interact with 15 Northern Hemisphere constellations. These range from Benjamin’s battle with a fierce dragon beneath Draco to a trio of unnamed ducklings who use the Swan to “find their way home.” Six further starry clusters bearing only labels are crowded into the final spread. In illustrations composed of thin white lines on matte black backgrounds (the characters formed by the stars are glossy), Aye colors significant stars yellow, connects them with dots, and encloses them in outlines of mythological figures that are as simply drawn as the animals and humans (and mermaid) below. As a practical introduction, this has little to offer budding sky watchers beyond a limited set of constellations—two, the Big Dipper and the Summer Triangle, are not official constellations at all but classified as asterisms—that are inconsistently labeled in Latin or English or both. Despite a closing invitation to go out and “find these stars in the sky,” the book provides no sky maps or verbal guidelines that would make that actually possible.
A promising approach—but too underpowered to reach orbital velocity. (Informational picture book. 4-6)Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63322-509-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Walter Foster Jr.
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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