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ALL ABOUT COLOR

Ambitious but underdeveloped and bewildering.

A meditation on the nature of color and some of its meanings.

“Color doesn’t exist,” Rusch writes. “The sky is not blue. The grass is not green. A violet is not even violet.” The point she’s making is that colors are just reflected light and our brains all perceive hues differently, but she doesn’t get around to explaining that, or any of her equally cryptic ensuing pronouncements about colors, until an afterword in small type that few befuddled young readers will be inclined to tackle. In flat, cut-paper illustrations that resemble screen prints, Goss struggles to provide clarifying examples for terse claims that colors provide signals and warnings, help us to stand out, somehow “make” us see red or feel blue, and can even “color your whole life!” An all-too-close image of a black widow spider’s red marking is the stuff of nightmares, and elsewhere two children who looked angry (depicted in hues of bright red) and then sad (“blue”) on previous spreads unconvincingly “brighten” their day on a page dominated by yellow in which they hug. Depicting a diverse cast of children, the art culminates with several kids gathering to “color” art projects, if not their lives, in a busy studio in which the creators’ likewise confusing All About Nothing (2023) is prominently on display.

Ambitious but underdeveloped and bewildering. (Informational picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: March 26, 2024

ISBN: 9781623543532

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Charlesbridge

Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024

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BUTT OR FACE?

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

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THE WONDERFUL WISDOM OF ANTS

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

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