A STEM-winder’s delight, awash in affirmation and the joy of discovery.
Science and fashion meet in this portrait of a 19th-century seamstress whose fascination with ocean life led both to multiple discoveries and to the invention of the glass-sided aquarium.
In the wake of Ocean Speaks (2020), illustrated by Katie Hickey, a profile of pioneering oceanographer Marie Tharp, Keating introduces another woman in marine science who was strong minded enough to torpedo sexist expectations. Folding lyrical touches into her measured account, the author follows Jeanne Villepreux as she learns how to use her hands to “transform a pile of nothing into a beautiful…something” in her parents’ dressmaking shop, then goes on to a successful career making high-society gowns in Paris before a move to Sicily (with “her fabric, her scissors, and her new husband”) sparks a second career studying the wildlife in the nearby shallows. Frustrated by the challenge of getting her specimens to hold still while she draws them, she constructs a waterproof glass box—and so becomes the first to discover that argonauts, a type of octopus, don’t steal their delicate shells from other creatures as was widely supposed but manufacture them, likewise “transforming what appeared to be nothing…into a beautiful something.” Nutter’s appropriately flowing illustrations take their smiling, self-possessed subject from ball gowns and formal dances to sandy beaches and work benches. Villepreux herself is White; montage sequences of colleagues worldwide receiving news of her discoveries feature both White and dark-skinned naturalists, including several other women. An afterword with a timeline fills in further detail about both the inventor and her eight-armed subjects. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A STEM-winder’s delight, awash in affirmation and the joy of discovery. (Picture-book biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-30511-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
A quick flight but a blast from first to last.
A charged-up roundup of astro-facts.
Having previously explored everything awesome about both dinosaurs (2019) and sharks (2020), Lowery now heads out along a well-traveled route, taking readers from the Big Bang through a planet-by-planet tour of the solar system and then through a selection of space-exploration highlights. The survey isn’t unique, but Lowery does pour on the gosh-wow by filling each hand-lettered, poster-style spread with emphatic colors and graphics. He also goes for the awesome in his selection of facts—so that readers get nothing about Newton’s laws of motion, for instance, but will come away knowing that just 65 years separate the Wright brothers’ flight and the first moon landing. They’ll also learn that space is silent but smells like burned steak (according to astronaut Chris Hadfield), that thanks to microgravity no one snores on the International Space Station, and that Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the moon…to use the bathroom. And, along with a set of forgettable space jokes (OK, one: “Why did the carnivore eat the shooting star?” “Because it was meteor”), the backmatter features drawing instructions for budding space artists and a short but choice reading list. Nods to Katherine Johnson and NASA’s other African American “computers” as well as astronomer Vera Rubin give women a solid presence in the otherwise male and largely White cast of humans. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A quick flight but a blast from first to last. (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-35974-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts.
From a Caldecott and Sibert honoree, an invitation to take a mind-expanding journey from the surface of our planet to the furthest reaches of the observable cosmos.
Though Chin’s assumption that we are even capable of understanding the scope of the universe is quixotic at best, he does effectively lead viewers on a journey that captures a sense of its scale. Following the model of Kees Boeke’s classic Cosmic View: The Universe in Forty Jumps (1957), he starts with four 8-year-old sky watchers of average height (and different racial presentations). They peer into a telescope and then are comically startled by the sudden arrival of an ostrich that is twice as tall…and then a giraffe that is over twice as tall as that…and going onward and upward, with ellipses at each page turn connecting the stages, past our atmosphere and solar system to the cosmic web of galactic superclusters. As he goes, precisely drawn earthly figures and features in the expansive illustrations give way to ever smaller celestial bodies and finally to glimmering swirls of distant lights against gulfs of deep black before ultimately returning to his starting place. A closing recap adds smaller images and additional details. Accompanying the spare narrative, valuable side notes supply specific lengths or distances and define their units of measure, accurately explain astronomical phenomena, and close with the provocative observation that “the observable universe is centered on us, but we are not in the center of the entire universe.”
A stimulating outing to the furthest reaches of our knowledge, certain to inspire deep thoughts. (afterword, websites, further reading) (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4623-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
