A scattershot assortment, easy on the eyes if only fitfully valuable for giving young inquiring minds the straight dope.
From how a hair dryer works to how cheese, chocolate, and ice cream are made, Esbaum offers simple answers to over 50 common questions.
Some of her answers are a little too simple: it’s hard to see any real difference between the two types of doorbells she describes, not quite right to characterize what the taste buds sense as “sweet, salty, bitter, sour, or just plain yucky,” and dead wrong to claim that when a rocket “is high enough to have escaped Earth’s gravity it has reached space.” Moreover, though grouped into six broad categories such as “Food” and “The Animal Kingdom,” within their rubrics, the questions and their arrangement both feel entirely arbitrary. Still, the big, square format and many bright color photos of animals, objects, and young people at work and play will encourage extended browsing. Each section includes one or more simple activities, such as a yummy demonstration of tectonic mountain-building using moistened graham crackers over a bed of whipped cream, and also a pattern recognition game that builds on previously presented facts.
A scattershot assortment, easy on the eyes if only fitfully valuable for giving young inquiring minds the straight dope. (bibliography, index, parent tips) (Nonfiction. 6-8)Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4263-2329-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: National Geographic Kids
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Not much for school-report fodder, but in the annals of American invention, Otis definitely rates the attention this profile...
A buoyant if free-wheeling tribute to Otis—inventor not of elevators themselves, but of a safety brake that eased public fears of riding in them.
Intent on telling a colorful tale rather than a systematic one, Kulling injects more anachronisms (of an early inspiration, circa 1845: “Betsy could almost see the lightbulb over her husband’s head”) and invented dialogue into her account than dates or other specific details. She follows her subject from delightedly watching a hoist drop a load of hay during his Vermont childhood to a dramatically staged demonstration of his safety brake at New York’s 1854 World’s Fair. This is sandwiched between a poem on “Elevator Etiquette” and a quick closing wrap-up that serves in place of any source notes or other backmatter. In his realistic, fine-lined illustrations, Parkins both enhances the sense of period and supplies the only hints of how Otis’ invention actually worked. He captures the narrative’s broad, high-energy tone in images of the inventor with eyes bulging, mouth wide open and arms flung out wildly during various Eureka! moments.
Not much for school-report fodder, but in the annals of American invention, Otis definitely rates the attention this profile (the first separate one for young readers since the 1970s) brings him. (Picture books/biography. 6-8)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-77049-240-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
At once stately and soothing—a fine choice for bedtime sharing or for calming ruffled spirits in general.
In sonorous cumulative verse, a seasonal round set in a garden rich in color, flowers and children.
Beginning and ending with the soil “all dark and deep,” seeds sprout, rain falls and flowers “waltz with the wind.” A songbird hatches, leaves turn, a mantis vainly prays to the moon “that winter come never or not quite so soon.” Jack Frost dances past, leaving an empty nest and “a handful of seeds for the wild wind to blow. / Enough, just enough, for a garden to grow.” Against backdrops of vibrant greens and blues, Cool poses a group of stylized children with distant eyes widely set in modernist, Picasso-esque faces, dressed in brightly patterned clothing and busily digging, watering, playing and, in season, harvesting. Millard introduces subtle changes in wording to the repeated lines to stave off monotony, and the leaves and patterns in the pictures create a dance of color that rises and falls in energy as the annual cycle turns.
At once stately and soothing—a fine choice for bedtime sharing or for calming ruffled spirits in general. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6016-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
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