by Jess Keating ; illustrated by David DeGrand ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 8, 2017
Lurid design detracts from the helpful message that even ugly, scary animals deserve protection.
An invitation to consider the title question through descriptions of 17 animals with monstrous features or habits.
Keating and DeGrand follow up Pink Is for Blobfish (2016) with another collection from the world of weird animals. Here they look at a wide variety of species, including human beings. Examples stretch broadly across the animal kingdom, even including brain-controlling fungi and the animal cooperative that makes up the organism known as the Portuguese man-of-war. Not all are obviously scary; the “sweet little prairie dog” is included as its fleas can carry bubonic plague. Each example is presented on a garishly colored double-page spread and illustrated with both a photograph and a cartoon. In the case of the secretive aye-aye, the images obscure or mis-illustrate its most salient feature, the elongated, rotator-jointed and claw-tipped middle finger on both “hands” that allows the aye-aye to probe inside a tree for grubs. Each spread offers a headline, one paragraph of description, a second with a curious fact, and a sidebar with proper and Latin names, size, diet, habitat, and predators and threats. A final spread connects famous monsters with some of these creatures but also asks readers to consider what they find frightening, whether the animal’s monstrous trait helps its survival, and whether they see human similarities.
Lurid design detracts from the helpful message that even ugly, scary animals deserve protection. (glossary) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-51230-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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by Jason Chin ; illustrated by Jason Chin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2020
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
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PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
by Mike Lowery ; illustrated by Mike Lowery ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2020
An immersive dunk into a vast subject—and on course for shorter attention spans.
In the wake of Everything Awesome About Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Beasts! (2019), Lowery spins out likewise frothy arrays of facts and observations about sharks, whales, giant squid, and smaller but no less extreme (or at least extremely interesting) sea life.
He provides plenty of value-added features, from overviews of oceanic zones and environments to jokes, drawing instructions, and portrait galleries suitable for copying or review. While not one to pass up any opportunity to, for instance, characterize ambergris as “whale vomit perfume” or the clownfish’s protective coating as “snot armor,” he also systematically introduces members of each of the eight orders of sharks, devotes most of a page to the shark’s electroreceptive ampullae of Lorenzini, and even sheds light on the unobvious differences between jellyfish and the Portuguese man-of-war or the reason why the blue octopus is said to have “arms” rather than “tentacles.” He also argues persuasively that sharks have gotten a bad rap (claiming that more people are killed each year by…vending machines) and closes with pleas to be concerned about plastic waste, to get involved in conservation efforts, and (cannily) to get out and explore our planet because (quoting Jacques-Yves Cousteau) “People protect what they love.” Human figures, some with brown skin, pop up occasionally to comment in the saturated color illustrations. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 45% of actual size.)
An immersive dunk into a vast subject—and on course for shorter attention spans. (bibliography, list of organizations) (Nonfiction. 7-10)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35973-2
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
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