A series of quick but thoroughly immersive dives.
In this French import, four young animal vacationers learn about the world ocean and many of its marvelous residents.
With Echid, a spiny relative visiting from Australia, serving as the main lecturer, the Science Adventure Club camps out on a tiny island for a weekend of banter and learning. They offer infodumps on oceans, tides, and wave types, the water cycle, climate change, and primeval life and the “Biological Big Bang” 500 million years ago that led to more complex organisms from seaweed and corals to blobfish and blue whales. Aside from debatable claims that humans are the oceans’ “biggest predators” and the “only beings on the planet that produce waste” (both of which may be translation issues), Alméras lays out a solid but easily digestible informational load in unframed, pale-hued, free-form panels that flow along, effortlessly drawing young naturalists (and viewers) from polar surface to hadalpelagic zones. The oceanic expedition fetches up at last back on the beach where it started. One of the friends notes that by 2050, floating plastic will “take up as much space as animals do in the ocean,” which serves as a spur for the author’s ensuing plea to get involved in cleanup and zero-waste causes.
A series of quick but thoroughly immersive dives. (Graphic nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781778400681
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Greystone Kids
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A change of pace from the typical blood-and-guts approach to the topic, populous enough to sate even the most rabid...
A quick trip through the Mesozoic Era with a paleontologist is all young Ronnie needs to become a dino-maniac.
So desperate is Ronnie to better a dinosaur exam’s failing grade that she’s willing to follow her odd but scholarly neighbor Miss Lernin into a curbside recycling bin—which, thanks to “Science Magic,” leaves the two in the late Triassic. Between meeting plateosaurs on that stop and a cozy nuzzle with a T. rex in the late Cretaceous, Ronnie gets an earful about dinosaur anatomy, convergent evolution, types of prehistoric life, protofeathers and other recent discoveries, and (as Miss Lernin puts it) “the exciting world of…phylogenetic trees!!” But mostly what she gets are dinosaurs. The graphic panels teem with (labeled) prehistoric life including, along with dozens of dinos, many early mammals and other contemporaries. Howard depicts nearly all of this fauna with snub noses and such friendly expressions that in no time (so to speak) Ronnie is exclaiming “Oh my gosh…Jurassic crocodylomorphs were so cute!” Indeed, her white tutor agrees, but also cool, dangerous, and majestic. Ronnie, who is depicted as a black girl, returns to the present to earn a perfect score on a retaken test and go on to spread the dino-word to her diverse classmates. Though the lack of source or resource lists is disappointing, closing graphic recaps of major prehistoric creatures and, yes, a phylogenetic tree provide some review.
A change of pace from the typical blood-and-guts approach to the topic, populous enough to sate even the most rabid dinophiles. (glossary) (Graphic informational fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2306-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Engagingly informal, more cogent than ever, and rich in rare facts and insights.
A graphic-novel history of the democratic ideal and its slow, difficult progress toward realization in the United States.
Following the practice of the three previous Big Ideas titles, Brown chooses a historical figure to conduct his tour, and he outdoes himself here by picking Abigail Adams—a brilliant, self-educated woman whose famous dictum to her husband, John, to “Remember the Ladies” positions her well to remember Native Americans, immigrants, and people of African descent as she chronicles the long struggle to build a “more Perfect Union,” from the principles of equal rights for all and government through “consent of the governed.” If her opening review of prehistoric linkages between the inventions of agriculture, cities, and governmental systems has been challenged recently, it holds in broad outline and sets up subsequent surveys of empires worldwide, of Athenian democracy, of republics from Rome to the Iroquois Confederacy, and of significant documents about rights such as the 13th-century Manden Charter in West Africa. She addresses the outrageous racist compromises built into our Constitution (“No, I’m not making it up”) and subsequent watermarks both low, like the Dred Scott Decision, and high, up to Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream of an equitable future. In the loosely drawn panels, dark- and olive-complexioned men and women are steadily present to reinforce the message that, yes, they, too, belong in this aspirational, still unfinished story.
Engagingly informal, more cogent than ever, and rich in rare facts and insights. (timeline, information on Abigail Adams, endnotes, bibliography, author’s note, index) (Graphic nonfiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5738-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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