Cheerfully delivered, this array of projects should inspire adults ready to dig into gardening adventures with kids.
Propelled by her volunteer work running a garden club at her daughter’s school, professional illustrator Coombs presents 38 garden projects organized by season.
The activities incorporate garden how-tos for eight types of plants as well as STEAM-oriented DIY projects such as charting plant growth, pressing flowers, and making seed bombs. Emphasizing budget-friendly options, Coombs encourages composting, seed saving, and repurposing plastic jugs as hanging baskets, watering cans, and scoops. Information about water conservation and the importance of fostering habitat for pollinators sharpens the ecological focus. An occasional British reference (e.g. encouraging slug-eating hedgehogs) slips into this import, and two superficial references to Native American gardening practices, incorporated in sidebars, come across as implications that they are quaint relics of a bygone, monolithic culture. With Coombs’ illustrated school newsletters as impetus, the text is often directed to adults. Only one project (pumpkin carving) mandates adult participation; others require the cutting of plastic bottles and bins with scissors, a metal skewer, and a drill and hacksaw. Illustrations are whimsical and clear. Coombs’ breezy, encouraging advice is often appealingly casual. However, certain specifics potentially mislead: planting pea seeds 12 inches apart (most packets advise closer spacing); suggesting that cherry tomatoes are reliably compact, bush varieties (in fact, many cherry varieties are free-growing, indeterminate types).
Cheerfully delivered, this array of projects should inspire adults ready to dig into gardening adventures with kids. (Informational picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-78708-025-6
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Button Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Adventure, humor, and smart, likable characters make for a winning chapter book.
Ada Twist’s incessant stream of questions leads to answers that help solve a neighborhood crisis.
Ada conducts experiments at home to answer questions such as, why does Mom’s coffee smell stronger than Dad’s coffee? Each answer leads to another question, another hypothesis, and another experiment, which is how she goes from collecting data on backyard birds for a citizen-science project to helping Rosie Revere figure out how to get her uncle Ned down from the sky, where his helium-filled “perilous pants” are keeping him afloat. The Questioneers—Rosie the engineer, Iggy Peck the architect, and Ada the scientist—work together, asking questions like scientists. Armed with knowledge (of molecules and air pressure, force and temperature) but more importantly, with curiosity, Ada works out a solution. Ada is a recognizable, three-dimensional girl in this delightfully silly chapter book: tirelessly curious and determined yet easily excited and still learning to express herself. If science concepts aren’t completely clear in this romp, relationships and emotions certainly are. In playful full- and half-page illustrations that break up the text, Ada is black with Afro-textured hair; Rosie and Iggy are white. A closing section on citizen science may inspire readers to get involved in science too; on the other hand, the “Ode to a Gas!” may just puzzle them. Other backmatter topics include the importance of bird study and the threat palm-oil use poses to rainforests.
Adventure, humor, and smart, likable characters make for a winning chapter book. (Fiction. 6-9)Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3422-9
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sloat collaborates with Huffman, a Yu’pik storyteller, to infuse a traditional “origins” tale with the joy of creating. Hearing the old women of her village grumble that they have only tasteless crowberries for the fall feast’s akutaq—described as “Eskimo ice cream,” though the recipe at the end includes mixing in shredded fish and lard—young Anana carefully fashions three dolls, then sings and dances them to life. Away they bound, to cover the hills with cranberries, blueberries, and salmonberries. Sloat dresses her smiling figures in mixes of furs and brightly patterned garb, and sends them tumbling exuberantly through grassy tundra scenes as wildlife large and small gathers to look on. Despite obtrusively inserted pronunciations for Yu’pik words in the text, young readers will be captivated by the action, and by Anana’s infectious delight. (Picture book/folktale. 6-8)
Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-88240-575-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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