An appealing mix of lively poems, engrossing pictures, and smart bookmaking.
Sixteen playful poems excavate soil and its symbiotic life-forms, targeting the subterranean habits of 12 animal species.
A tongue-in-cheek “Dirt Recipe” lists ingredients that serve “a host of hungry fungi / and at least a billion germs.” Some poems focus on how and what critters eat. The doodlebug’s earthen funnel can catch ants while the trapdoor spider’s ingenious hinged snare captures others. Harrison’s accessible verse frequently employs rhymed couplets: “A thousand ants, without a sound, / build a city underground.” Elsewhere, he explores poetic forms: “Doodlebug” is a funnel-shaped concrete poem; “Gopher Tortoise” is a villanelle. Cosgrove’s pictures expertly exploit the clever vertical orientation, with double-page spreads depicting both aboveground and subterrestrial realms. Above the gutter, “Yellow Jacket Wasp” depicts two, one flying, another climbing from a small hole in the ground. Below, another 15 emerge from a nest whose dark opening ominously promises more. Occasionally, the artist extends a poem’s meaning by presenting two views. For “Bumblebee,” a queen is shown among autumn leaves, then burrowed into a cozy winterized home. Two kids of color appear occasionally. The color palette combines naturalistic and fanciful hues: Wasps and bees sport their black and yellow stripes amid woodland scenes in seafoam, teal, and dusty lavender. Harrison includes additional notes for the poems’ 14 subjects, with at least one overgeneralization. (Not all grubs are “baby Japanese beetle[s].”)
An appealing mix of lively poems, engrossing pictures, and smart bookmaking. (web citations) (Informational picture book/poetry. 5-9)Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3861-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A refreshing dive past some of our world’s marine wonders.
Denizens of the deep crowd oversized pages in this populous gallery of ocean life.
The finny and tentacled sea creatures drifting or arrowing through Zommer’s teeming watercolor seascapes are generally recognizable, and they are livened rather than distorted by the artist’s tendency to place human eyes on the same side of many faces, Picasso-like. Headers such as “Ink-teresting” or “In for the krill” likewise add a playful tone to the pithy comments on anatomical features or behavioral quirks that accompany the figures (which include, though rarely, a white human diver). The topical spreads begin with an overview of ocean families (“Some are hairy, some have scales, some have fins and some are boneless and brainless!”), go on to introduce select animals in no particular order from sea horses and dragonets to penguins and pufferfish, then close with cautionary remarks on chemical pollution and floating plastic. The author invites readers as they go to find both answers to such questions as “Why does a crab run sideways?” and also a small sardine hidden in some, but not all, of the pictures. For the latter he provides a visual key at the end, followed by a basic glossary.
A refreshing dive past some of our world’s marine wonders. (index) (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-65119-3
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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