An epic, energetic flight into the dimmer reaches of our local astronomical neighborhood.
The creators of If You Had Your Birthday Party on the Moon (2019) chronicle a far more venturesome outing.
Bursting up from Earth, wrapped in gold foil (real) and a huge grin (fictive), the New Horizons probe sets out for distant Pluto to answer questions ranging from “What color [is] its sky?” to “[Are] there gross creepy-crawly things?” Along her weary way, she learns that Pluto gets downgraded to a dwarf planet (“Well, this stung a bit”), but after getting a gravity assist from “ginormous” Jupiter and falling into a long, long semisleep, the probe at last wakes up, focuses her cameras, and “on July 14, 2015, Pluto suddenly became a place.” A place, Lapin notes in her generous payload of scientific observations and findings, with not one but five moons, a huge heart-shaped glacier of frozen nitrogen, and just maybe an un-frozen subsurface ocean suitable for harboring life. But Pluto is only the beginning for the plucky probe, as she has continued on her multibillion-mile course past the strangely shaped Kuiper belt object Arrokoth (sky in the Powhatan tongue) in 2019 and is still barreling along her astronomical track to worlds beyond. (Stay tuned for further developments.) Small inset photos and graphics add helpful views of orbits, several more dwarf planets, and other details. With just one exception, all the Earthbound scientists following the expedition present White. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-17-inch double-page spreads viewed at 75% of actual size.)
An epic, energetic flight into the dimmer reaches of our local astronomical neighborhood. (timeline, glossary, bibliography, websites) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4549-3755-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sterling
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A limited but mildly stimulating gathering on a (possibly) timely theme.
Animal athletes compete for the gold.
In this unrelated but similarly conceived counterpart to Richard Turner’s Wildlife Winter Games, illustrated by Ben Clifford (2019), three disparate competitors line up to show their stuff in each of 12 events, from long jump (flea; grasshopper; kangaroo rat: “I can jump backward, too!”) to general climbing (gecko; gelada baboon; mountain goat). Brown supplies a few lines of basic facts about the capabilities of each entrant and awards the gold to one—often the smallest, as, for instance, rhinoceros beetles can lift many more times their body weight than elephants or gorillas, and a mantis shrimp’s punch is more powerful for its size than anything a brown hare or eastern gray kangaroo can deliver. In her tidy, stylized illustrations, Tanis doesn’t draw the animals to scale but does outfit them in athletic gear and garb on one side of each double-page spread to add a bit of fun and then shows them in natural settings on facing pages. Steer readers with a yen to continue the games to Martin Jenkins’ Animal Awards, illustrated by Tor Freeman (2019), which broadens the areas of competition beyond sports, and Mark Carwardine’s much more expansive Natural History Museum Book of Animal Records (2013).
A limited but mildly stimulating gathering on a (possibly) timely theme. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78240-987-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Ivy Kids
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Bright and lively—but saddled with misses both near and wide.
The creators of The Great Big Body Book (2016) pay tribute to the organ “in charge of every single thing our bodies can do.” (Though look what’s telling them that.)
That’s just the first of several simplistic or downright wrong claims in an otherwise perceptive and lighthearted overview that covers the brain’s growth and general structure, its role in perception as well as cognition and communication, emotions, learning and memory (including amnesia and Alzheimer’s), developmental differences, sleep, and dreams—all in nontechnical language. Along with throwing out tantalizing statements like the brain “changes again a lot during the teenage years” without elaboration and that dreaming may help in “getting rid of things we don’t need,” Hoffman misses opportunities to, for instance, mention more than the traditional five senses. She also muddles her own more accurate account of how the nervous system works with a line about how neurons “head back to your brain” with sensory messages, and, in what comes off as a weak attempt to reassure readers anxious about being replaced by robots, abruptly switches tracks to close with dismissive views about the current state of artificial intelligence. Asquith mixes a satisfyingly inclusive crowd of expressive human figures in active poses with bright cartoon diagrams and anatomical views…but she includes a long-debunked “map” of where taste buds are located on the tongue that doesn’t include “umami” in the labeling.
Bright and lively—but saddled with misses both near and wide. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4154-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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