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CHARLOTTE'S BONES

Name: CHARLOTTE'S BONES
Author: Erin Rounds
ISBN: 978-0-88448-485-1

THE BELUGA WHALE IN A FARMER'S FIELD

From the Tilbury House Nature Book series

by Erin Rounds ; illustrated by Alison Carver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2018

Not exactly seamless but all in all a substantial introduction to a significant North American fossil.

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The story of Charlotte, Vermont’s official state marine fossil.

Rounds labors to draw a poetic message from the 11,500-year-old bones of a beluga that were unearthed in 1849 some 150 miles from the sea (“ ‘I was alive like you,’ they say. / ‘Time goes by fast,’ they say. / ‘The Earth is both strong and fragile’ ”) That’s a stretch, but her reconstruction of the whale’s likely history and her much-lengthier appended notes—on belugas, on who discovered the fossil, on what its discovery implied about the area’s prehistory, on glaciation in the Champlain Valley, and on Ice Age mammals of the region both extant and extinct—offer more than enough for readers to absorb and ponder. Carver supplies full-bleed landscapes stocked with woolly mammoths and musk oxen; views of “Charlotte” swimming with her pod, trapped in a tide pool, and then decomposing in stages; 19th-century workers (their faces indistinct but some, at least, possibly people of color) excavating a rail bed; a white naturalist (Zadock Thompson, unnamed in the main narrative) laying the bones out on a floor for study; and finally the assembled fossil in its modern exhibit case.

Not exactly seamless but all in all a substantial introduction to a significant North American fossil. (map, glossary, resource list) (Informational picture book. 7-9)

Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-88448-485-1

Page Count: 36

Publisher: Tilbury House

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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SAVING YASHA

THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF AN ADOPTED MOON BEAR

by Lia Kvatum & photographed by Liya Pokrovskaya ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 2012

An affectionate picture of bears and bear scientists, capped with a page of moon bear facts and an afterword.

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Not one but three roly-poly moon bear cubs star in this true animal rescue tale.

Orphaned by poachers, Yasha, joined later by Shum and Shiksha, are nurtured by Pokrovskaya and another scientist for nearly two years on a game preserve until they were ready to be released into the Siberian wild. Taking a slightly anthropomorphized bear’s-eye point of view (“Yasha was happy with his new home”), Kvatum chronicles the cubs’ development as they learn to forage on their own while playing together and learning to climb trees. She also notes how important it is for human observers to remain aloof—minimizing physical contact and even wearing scent-concealing clothing—to prevent the animals from becoming dependent or domesticated. Looking positively fetching in the big, color photos, shaggy Yasha and his ursine cohorts grow visibly as they ramble through woodsy settings, splash in a river and survive an encounter with a prowling tiger before being deemed ready to live on their own.

An affectionate picture of bears and bear scientists, capped with a page of moon bear facts and an afterword. (map, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 7-9)

Pub Date: July 10, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4263-1051-5

Page Count: 32

Publisher: National Geographic

Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS

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HOW TO BUILD A CAR

From the Technical Tales series

by Saskia Lacey ; illustrated by Martin Sodomka ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2015

Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete...

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A mouse, a bird, and a junkyard frog assemble a car from the ground up—cluing in readers who may be a bit vague on what’s beneath all those hoods…or at least what used to be.

Enlisting his green buddy Hank to supply the parts and feathered Phoebe to draw up the plans, Eli, “king of crazy ideas,” sees his latest project grow from a frame and some miscellaneous loose parts to a nifty blue convertible with a classic 1950s look. At each stage, Sodomka supplies clearly drawn angled or cutaway views with dozens of major components labeled, from “steering knuckle bracket” to “tie rod” and “ball joint.” The gas tank is labeled but seems to be missing, though, and readers who want to know what a “differential” actually does or the purpose of the “indicator switch” are out of luck. Lacey’s claim that an engine “is like the brain of the car” doesn’t bear close examination, either. Moreover, the finished auto isn’t much like most modern cars, as it has no electronic elements, for instance, and is powered by a three-cylinder engine (misleadingly billed as “regular”) quaintly fed by a long-obsolescent carburetor. With an auto under their belts (and with similar oversimplification), Eli’s “Scrap Pack” goes on to an even more ambitious enterprise in How to Build a Plane. In both volumes, closer looks at selected systems or related topics follow the storyline’s happy conclusion, and each broad trial-and-error step in the construction is recapped at the end.

Young makers will find the Scrap Pack’s enthusiasm infectious, but even as broad overviews, these offer at best incomplete pictures. (Informational picture book. 7-9)