A highly engaging overview that will have readers eager to learn more.
A dynamic introduction to 17 of the world’s most adorable creatures.
Keating and DeGrand’s follow-up to Pink Is for Blobfish (2015) and What Makes a Monster? (2017) highlights still more unusual animals. Each double-page spread is dedicated to one particular animal and has four consistent features. On the verso is a large, stock photograph underneath the phrase “Cute as an [ANIMAL].” On the recto is a paragraph with a brief overview of what makes the animal notable; a sidebar with a rundown of the animal’s Latin name, size, diet, habitat, and predators and threats; and a brightly colored pull-out paragraph highlighting a particularly intriguing fact and paired with a cartoonlike illustration from DeGrand. Animals included range from the mandatory (pygmy hippopotamus, fennec fox) to the surprising (pom-pom crab, blue dragon sea slug). Close-up photographs provide excellent detail but don’t provide a realistic scale, especially for the smaller animals, and thus the animals that are cute in part due to their size lose some of their cuteness. A concluding spread explores “the science of cute,” and potentially unfamiliar vocabulary words are highlighted throughout in bold, leading to a glossary in the back. Keating’s chipper voice always shines through (“With its perma-smile and fuzzy face, the QUOKKA is fast becoming one of the world’s best-known cutie-pies”).
A highly engaging overview that will have readers eager to learn more. (Informational picture book. 7-11)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6447-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
An inspiring and definitely underrecognized role model.
A young Black woman revolutionizes warship design for the U.S. Navy.
Swanson skips most of her subject’s private life to focus on her engineering career, which was inspired by a childhood tour of a WWII submarine in 1943 and culminated in the first naval ship to be entirely designed by computer. Taking to heart her mother’s lesson that she could “learn anything, do anything, and be anything,” Montague defied rules and conventions to take shop in high school, advance from clerk typist for the Navy to ad hoc operator of the early UNIVAC computer, finally earn reluctant admission to the Naval Ship Engineering Center, and head a software-development team so underfunded that she had to recruit her mother and 3-year-old son to ensure that she met her deadline. Montague went on to a long and distinguished career. As she told the author in 2017 (she died in 2018, which goes unmentioned among the closing tally of later honors and awards), she wanted to be remembered for her achievements, not as the first woman, nor the first Black woman, but as the first person to create what she did. As she proceeds from pigtails to gray-haired eminence in Jamison’s illustrations, Montague’s lively, intelligent gaze shines out. Aside from one group portrait of her racially diverse design team, she poses either with other brown-skinned female colleagues or with dismissive, oblivious, and/or astonished white men.
An inspiring and definitely underrecognized role model. (author’s note, source list) (Picture-book biography. 7-9)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780316565486
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Does help to clarify a trendy pedagogical concept, but in a catch-as-catch-can manner.
A broad sampler of STEAM-related topics and areas.
Five cartoon icons representing the titular “team” usher younger readers through a series of loosely related single-spread surveys, beginning with the universe and solar system and ending with the internet and robots. In between they touch on our planet’s weather and (changing) climate, simple machines, bridges, arithmetic, the human brain, and 25 other select subjects. The presentation barrages younger readers with basic snippets of fact, printed in various type sizes and weights. They can usually be read in any order as they are all fitted into a brightly colored jumble of digitally painted elements and cutout photos. Human figures are rare but, where large enough to tell, are racially diverse. Though there is only one obvious misprint (“Light travels nearly 6 million miles (10 trillion km) a year”), the sheer range of topics here makes hope of finding any of them treated systematically chimerical. So it is, for instance, that “ordinal” numbers are defined but not “cardinal” ones, only three of the four common states of matter make the cut, and senses beyond the traditional five are ignored beyond repeated mentions that they exist. Also, aside from the occasional suggestion to paint a rainbow or a toucan’s beak, STEAM’s “A” (for “Art”) is largely along for the ride, and along with a lack of leads to further information about any of the contents, the backmatter’s closing glossary and index are, at best, inadequate.
Does help to clarify a trendy pedagogical concept, but in a catch-as-catch-can manner. (Nonfiction. 7-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4654-6851-2
Page Count: 80
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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