Not a page-turner but a charming—and appetizing—bit of didacticism.
Two light-skinned children named X and Y, apparently siblings, ask their brainy aunt, Z, to help them make the pies of their dreams.
X wants to make an infinitely wide pie, while Y imagines a pie that is infinitely tall. Aunt Z explains that “there are infinite different ways to make pastry” and guides the children through the steps of the recipe. When it’s time to roll out the dough, X makes a circle while Y makes a triangle. When they fill the pies, X chooses bananas “because the slices are round,” and Y opts for triangular strawberry slices. Once in the oven, the pies seem “to be taking infinitely long” to bake and smell “infinitely delicious,” and when they’re finished, they’re so scrumptious the kids want them to last forever. Luckily, Aunt Z knows a clever way to make “infinite pie.” She helps the children make yet more dough and shape it into fractals—the Apollonian gasket and the Koch snowflake—that have an infinite number of sides. In the process, Aunt Z explains mathematical concepts (further expounded in the backmatter) in accessible language, including the coordinate plane, combinatorics, polygons, and convergence. This discussion includes a fair amount of precalculus for readers who might not have mastered the times table as yet, but as Cheng says in her author’s note, “if we can get our heads around something daunting, then [we] become more intelligent.” After the baking is done, the characters have more pie than they can eat, but thankfully, they have “infinite friends to share it with.” The illustrations, done in ink and Photoshop, use clever visuals to bring the math lesson to life; for example, on one spread the pie ingredients zoom around the characters, the motion lines making the shape of the infinity symbol.
Not a page-turner but a charming—and appetizing—bit of didacticism. (notes, recipe) (Picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5686-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An idyllic view of the conventional annual cycle.
Trees leaf out and change color, wildflowers bloom, birds nest, and fawns and fox kits grow through a four-season round.
The hand of man never appears in Taylor’s deciduous dells, and they teem with wildlife for young viewers to spot. Maskell’s bland text, set in noodle-shaped captions, helps by pointing out highlights or setting easy challenges: “A woodpecker drums on a tree trunk calling for a mate”; “The leaves turn red, orange, and gold”; “Can you count 12 birds with yellow chests?” If the natural history is sometimes a bit vague (“Minibeasts live inside this tree trunk, and others creep up underneath”) and much of the flora and fauna goes unidentified, still the sylvan residents are at least naturalistically depicted. Also, though the woodland biome doesn’t change, each scene is slightly different, as though viewers were turning in place. The artist varies the quality of light from tableau to tableau as well, and the pop-up trees create tantalizing depths and shadows. The covers can be folded back and tied with a ribbon to create a turnable panorama. Most animals will be recognizable to residents of the temperate zones of North America despite the book’s European setting.
An idyllic view of the conventional annual cycle. (Informational pop-up novelty. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78627-306-2
Page Count: 8
Publisher: Laurence King
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
Eye-widening indeed—in design as well as topic.
Keen looks into, and through, a wide range of animal eyes.
Duprat opens his large-format gallery of vividly rendered animal faces, life size or (much) larger, with a fold-out leaf on which a surrealistic outdoor scene that is clear in the middle distance but a bit blurry in back- and foreground reproduces a typical human field of vision. On subsequent pages viewers can lift flaps to see how a chimp and a dog, an eagle, a frog, an earthworm, a bee, and 14 other creatures would see that scene’s colors, objects, and edges. He shows what a cat would see by day and at night, varies the generally binocular view in a startling way by pointing a chameleon’s eyes in two different directions, and suggests what the 360-degree perspective of a woodcock might look like. Along the way, in lucid specifics he explains how rods and cones gather information and brains process it, points out anatomical differences in each animal’s ocular structure, and describes how each animal’s distinctive combination of perceptual capabilities help it find or avoid becoming food. But even readers disinclined to care much about “ommatidia” or the difference between “dichromat” and “trichromat” retinas will be riveted by the experience of lifting flaps and literally (with the given proviso that we must imagine what birds and other animals who see into the ultraviolet perceive) seeing through new eyes.
Eye-widening indeed—in design as well as topic. (index, source list) (Informational novelty. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-999802-85-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: What on Earth!
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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