A sobering, beautifully presented extinction story.
Hundreds of thousands of great auks once swam in cold northern waters, but these birds have all disappeared owing to a tragic intersection of climate change and human activities.
Thornhill starts with an admirable depiction of this remarkable bird, known even to prehistoric cave painters. "Behold the Great Auk! The Gejrfugl! The northern penguin!" she begins. A tall black-and-white bird stands proudly on a rock on the facing page, looking across at a flock on another rocky island, outlined in white like ghosts. Her illustrations, done with stylus and tablet, have the look of acrylic paintings, and they are striking, with text sitting directly on the double-page illustrations. She tells this sad story smoothly and relatively gently while showing readers flocks of identifiable seabirds, schools of fish, small boats (a Viking ship, an Inuit kayak) on rough seas, the back of a fox looking down on an inaccessible island roost, a chick being fed, collections of eggs, and stuffed birds in a 19th-century museum. Many illustrations pull back to show the landscape, but some are close-ups—most effectively, a broken egg in front of the boots of the Icelandic fishermen who strangled the last two auks remaining in the world. She concludes with the legacy of this loss, part of the impetus for the bird conservation movement.
A sobering, beautifully presented extinction story. (map, glossary, list of extinct species, resources, references) (Nonfiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-55498-865-5
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The intelligences here may be (mostly) artificial, but the feelings are genuine and deep.
A Mars rover discovers that it has a heart to go with its two brains.
Warga follows her cybernetic narrator from first awareness to final resting place—and stony indeed will be any readers who remain unmoved by the journey. Though unable to ask questions of the hazmats (named for their suits) assembling it in a NASA lab, the rover, dubbed Resilience by an Ohio sixth grader, gets its first inklings of human feelings from two workers who talk to it, play it music, and write its pleasingly bug-free code. Other machines (even chatty cellphones) reject the notion that there’s any real value to emotions. But the longer those conversations go, the more human many start sounding, particularly after Res lands in Mars’ Jezero Crater and, with help from Fly, a comically excitable drone, and bossy satellite Guardian, sets off on twin missions to look for evidence of life and see if an older, silenced rover can be brought back online. Along with giving her characters, human and otherwise, distinct voices and engaging personalities, the author quietly builds solid relationships (it’s hardly a surprise when, after Fly is downed in a dust storm, Res trundles heroically to the rescue in defiance of orders) on the way to rest and joyful reunions years later. A subplot involving brown-skinned, Arabic-speaking NASA coder Rania unfolds through her daughter Sophia’s letters to Res.
The intelligences here may be (mostly) artificial, but the feelings are genuine and deep. (afterword, resources) (Science fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-311392-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
Dolphin lovers will appreciate this look at our complicated relationship with these marine mammals.
Is dolphin-assisted therapy so beneficial to patients that it’s worth keeping a wild dolphin captive?
Twelve-year-old Lily has lived with her emotionally distant oncologist stepfather and a succession of nannies since her mother died in a car accident two years ago. Nannies leave because of the difficulty of caring for Adam, Lily’s severely autistic 4-year-old half brother. The newest, Suzanne, seems promising, but Lily is tired of feeling like a planet orbiting the sun Adam. When she meets blind Zoe, who will attend the same private middle school as Lily in the fall, Lily’s happy to have a friend. However, Zoe’s take on the plight of the captive dolphin, Nori, used in Adam’s therapy opens Lily’s eyes. She knows she must use her influence over her stepfather, who is consulting on Nori’s treatment for cancer (caused by an oil spill), to free the animal. Lily’s got several fine lines to walk, as she works to hold onto her new friend, convince her stepfather of the rightness of releasing Nori, and do what’s best for Adam. In her newest exploration of animal-human relationships, Rorby’s lonely, mature heroine faces tough but realistic situations. Siblings of children on the spectrum will identify with Lily. If the tale flirts with sentimentality and some of the characters are strident in their views, the whole never feels maudlin or didactic.
Dolphin lovers will appreciate this look at our complicated relationship with these marine mammals. (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-67605-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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