A whimsical tribute to the maker of the famous, frustrating, and absorbing puzzle.
Ernő Rubik grows from a solitary but curious, puzzle-loving child into a determined adult.
Born in Budapest in 1944, Ernő liked to manipulate shapes, playing with “tangrams, pentominoes, and pentacubes”—all depicted in the art. He appreciated nature, too, and as he grew up, he studied architecture and art and became a teacher. While building models to help his students learn about three-dimensional shapes, he became intrigued by cubes: “Would it be possible to build a big cube out of smaller cubes that moved around each other and stayed connected?” He started with eight cubes, attaching them with paper clips and rubber bands. That didn’t work, but he persevered and subsequently devised the 26-cube model. But how to hold it together? Ernő was inspired when he observed a rushing river moving around smooth pebbles. Similarly, his small cubes could move around a fixed mechanical center—and finally, he added colors on each side. Ernő was just 29 when he invented the Rubik’s Cube in 1974; more than a billion people would eventually play with his toy. The straightforward narrative ends with backmatter noting that Rubik didn’t intend to create a puzzle, and when he realized what it was, it took him a month to solve it. The bright, naïve collage artwork is quirky and inventive: Rubik’s head is sometimes cubic, and perspective is at times skewed.
A whimsical tribute to the maker of the famous, frustrating, and absorbing puzzle. (author’s note, resources) (Picture-book biography. 4-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9781682636640
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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