DOWNPOUR

Name: DOWNPOUR
Author: Emily Martin
ISBN: 978-1-62087-545-2

by Emily Martin ; illustrated by Mara Shaughnessy ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2013

A pale, poorly conceived rumination on color; choose instead Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Green (2012) or Joyce Sidman’s Red Sings...

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A repeated spell-check fail and, more seriously, a discomfiting color choice make this visionary lyric a washout.

Bearing in two interior illustrations and on the rear cover a newspaper with the malaprop headline “Downpour leeches [sic] red,” a hedgehog splashes its way through a rain shower. He drops a sweet love note into the mailbox and then returns home for a cozy nap. Meanwhile, the rain has washed the color out of all the poppies, staining everything red, from a frog to the mailbox, the hedgehog and even the hair of a girl’s head and an old man’s beard. Martin’s incantatory free-verse text will raise disturbing associations even in readers who aren’t familiar with Peter Gabriel’s song “Red Rain,” the war poem “In Flanders Fields,” or mentions of rains and rivers of blood in Homer, the Book of Exodus and throughout literature. “Then, red, the roots, / Red, the ground, / Red, the stones sitting around. / Red, the grass underfoot. // Red, the beaks of curious birds. / Red, the field where sit the poppies.” Moreover, to sparely drawn illustrations done in thin gray wash and fine ink lines, Shaughnessy adds brushed swabs of a single shade of bright, fire engine red that looks artificial on her human figures and turns the feet, beaks and bodies of animals into bloody highlights. The hedgehog is last seen repainting the poppies, but that’s too little, too late.

A pale, poorly conceived rumination on color; choose instead Laura Vaccaro Seeger’s Green (2012) or Joyce Sidman’s Red Sings from Treetops (2009), illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: June 4, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-62087-545-2

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Sky Pony Press

Review Posted Online: May 3, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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FIVE WAYS TO FALL OUT OF LOVE
by Emily Martin

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THE YEAR WE FELL APART
by Emily Martin

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TOUCH THE EARTH

From the Julian Lennon White Feather Flier Adventure series , Vol. 1

by Julian Lennon with Bart Davis ; illustrated by Smiljana Coh ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017

“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so...

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A pro bono Twinkie of a book invites readers to fly off in a magic plane to bring clean water to our planet’s oceans, deserts, and brown children.

Following a confusingly phrased suggestion beneath a soft-focus world map to “touch the Earth. Now touch where you live,” a shake of the volume transforms it into a plane with eyes and feathered wings that flies with the press of a flat, gray “button” painted onto the page. Pressing like buttons along the journey releases a gush of fresh water from the ground—and later, illogically, provides a filtration device that changes water “from yucky to clean”—for thirsty groups of smiling, brown-skinned people. At other stops, a tap on the button will “help irrigate the desert,” and touching floating bottles and other debris in the ocean supposedly makes it all disappear so the fish can return. The 20 children Coh places on a globe toward the end are varied of skin tone, but three of the four young saviors she plants in the flier’s cockpit as audience stand-ins are white. The closing poem isn’t so openly parochial, though it seldom rises above vague feel-good sentiments: “Love the Earth, the moon and sun. / All the children can be one.”

“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so easy to clean the place up and give everyone a drink? (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: April 11, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-5107-2083-1

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Sky Pony Press

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
HEAL THE EARTH
by Julian Lennon & Bart Davis ; illustrated by Smiljana Coh

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PLUTO GETS THE CALL

by Adam Rex ; illustrated by Laurie Keller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 12, 2019

Hurray for the underdog.

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Heart (-shaped surface feature) literally broken by its demotion from planet status, Pluto glumly conducts readers on a tour of the solar system.

You’d be bummed, too. Angrily rejecting the suggestions of “mean scientists” from Earth that “ice dwarf” or “plutoid” might serve as well (“Would you like to be called humanoid?”), Pluto drifts out of the Kuiper Belt to lead readers past the so-called “real” planets in succession. All sport faces with googly eyes in Keller’s bright illustrations, and distinct personalities, too—but also actual physical characteristics (“Neptune is pretty icy. And gassy. I’m not being mean, he just is”) that are supplemented by pages of “fun facts” at the end. Having fended off Saturn’s flirtation, endured Jupiter’s stormy reception (“Keep OFF THE GAS!”) and relentless mockery from the asteroids, and given Earth the cold shoulder, Pluto at last takes the sympathetic suggestion of Venus and Mercury to talk to the Sun. “She’s pretty bright.” A (what else?) warm welcome, plus our local star’s comforting reminders that every celestial body is unique (though “people talk about Uranus for reasons I don’t really want to get into”), and anyway, scientists are still arguing the matter because that’s what “science” is all about, mend Pluto’s heart at last: “Whatever I’m called, I’ll always be PLUTO!”

Hurray for the underdog. (afterword) (Informational picture book. 6-8)