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KIDS COOKING

STUDENTS PREPARE AND EAT FOODS FROM AROUND THE WORLD

Spice up school, library, or home cooking projects with this beginning guide to the fun of cooking.

Kids all over are eating foods from different countries, as people from various cultures settle everywhere.

In Santa Fe schools, children experience global cooking with healthy ingredients thanks to the organization Cooking with Kids. Visiting chefs teach kids dicing, cutting, chopping (with butter knives), measuring, stirring, using a mortar and pestle, and mixing. The students learn about grains, vegetables, and spices used in international cuisines. The adults handle the stove and oven tasks. In his latest photo essay, Ancona features diverse kids and adults as they prepare Moroccan root vegetables with a cilantro-based sauce called chermoula and minted orange pieces, Chinese-American fried rice with sweet and sour cucumbers, Italian minestrone soup with homemade breadsticks, and Mexican salsa, tortillas, and tamales. (Readers tantalized by these descriptions will find recipes on the publisher’s website.) Each page has a slightly different layout, and children’s crayon drawings are also incorporated. Everyone gets a chance to taste the finished products, learning expressions such as “Chi fàn luo” (“Good eating” in Chinese) and “Buen provecho” (“Have a good meal” in Spanish). Teachers or librarians can gather program ideas such as using a globe to indicate a recipe’s origins (although there is no map) or reading a story to introduce a recipe. Kids will sense the excitement that accompanies these classes and clamor for cooking lessons.

Spice up school, library, or home cooking projects with this beginning guide to the fun of cooking. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-7636-9876-8

Page Count: 33

Publisher: Candlewick

Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018

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THE LITTLE BOOK OF JOY

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.

From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.

Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022

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DO NOT LICK THIS BOOK

Science at its best: informative and gross.

Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”

Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.

Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

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