An effective pep talk, but thin on specifics.
Rhymed salutes to 10 common creations patented by Black inventors.
Young audiences will recognize at least some of the inventions Miroballi celebrates, such as automatic elevator doors and ice cream scoops with built-in scrapers, but their inventors’ names are shuffled off here to narrow, easy-to-miss vertical sidebars, and the single descriptive couplet she provides for each entry is only a little skimpier than the terse paragraphs of explanation at the end. Cloud doesn’t do much to fill in the details; scenes of an extended Black family engaged in domestic tasks and gathering for a birthday party add a warm, homey atmosphere, but except for that scoop (shown in use at an ice cream parlor), the original inventions aren't depicted until the endpapers and, in the story itself, are generally represented only by images of modern, very different versions. Still, the author’s closing observation that these men and women are worth celebrating for the way they pressed on in the face of systemic discrimination and other obstacles is well taken, brought home by the nod to Alice H. Parker, who patented a gas-fired home heating system in 1919 but is otherwise so obscure that her thumbnail portrait is just a generic silhouette.
An effective pep talk, but thin on specifics. (selected sources, further reading) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781419769962
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Abrams Appleseed
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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