Brightened by sunny, simply drawn cartoons featuring people of several ages and skin shades, this introduction to the reproductive organs is designed as much to allay parental anxiety as to provide answers to younger children’s questions. Saltz, a practicing psychiatrist, describes the male and female set-ups in a light, relaxed tone, suggesting that it’s better to use specific terms rather than euphemisms for visible organs, and tracking physical changes from infancy to adulthood. She steers clear of topics deemed beyond her child audience’s understanding, such as sexual intercourse, or stages of fetal development, and backs up vague allusions to masturbation and privacy boundaries with a closing note in much smaller type. Though urethras are repeatedly mentioned but never illustrated, there are no lists of further information sources, and a description of sperm as looking “sort of like tadpoles” may leave some misapprehensions about their size, this makes an adequate discussion starter for parents with children not yet up to the level of detail in Robie H. Harris’s It’s So Amazing! (1999). (Picture book/nonfiction. 5-7)
Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-525-47389-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Itty Bitty may be the most aptly named pooch ever, but here he moves with inspiring confidence through normal-sized city and country alike. Puttering beneath towering daisies aboard a walnut-shell tricycle in Bell’s small, retro-style scenes, the stick-legged Itty Bitty comes upon a bone big enough to live in—once he’s gnawed out a door and windows, that is. Some furnishings then being in order, down the highway to town he drives. The department store’s full-size furniture draws a dismayed “Whoa,” but big signs point to the “Teeny-Weeny Department,” where he finds not only itty-bitty rugs and itty-bitty sofas, but itty-bitty books, too. In no time his new place “felt like home,” and in the closing vignette he nestles down in his new digs for a cozy nighttime read. Children will do the same with this terse, appropriately diminutive but definitive assurance that size really doesn’t matter. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7636-3616-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
The perennially popular lift-the-flap format combines with the equally well-received invitation to make animal noises in this pleasing romp through a variety of regions and biomes. An African child on the riverbank asks, “Who can snap?” Lift the flap in the reeds for the answer: “I’m a crocodile. I can!” A duck in a farm pond, a panda in a bamboo grove, a wolf on the tundra and a parrot in an Asian jungle follow in succession, all leading to a final spread that unites all the children: “And we all can sing!” Mockford’s illustrations employ baby-friendly bold, black outlines and vibrant colors. A companion volume, Walk with Me (ISBN: 978-1-84686-179-6), explores animal locomotion. (6-24 mos.)
Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84686-180-2
Page Count: 16
Publisher: Barefoot Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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