A visually delightful capybara primer best enjoyed as a read-aloud.
Curious kids explore what makes capybaras so special—and learn that there’s so much more to these oversize rodents than their cute appearance.
McCloskey uses the comics format to great effect once more as two children—one white, one Black—trade banter while uncovering facts about capybaras. The vibrant gouache and ink illustrations carry much of the storytelling, depicting everything from the animals’ sharp teeth to their scent glands with kid-friendly humor. McCloskey’s expressive characters have wide eyes and make animated gestures, while his capybaras range from realistically textured to charmingly cartoonish depending on context. Standout images include one of capybaras in a Japanese zoo luxuriating in hot tubs and a visual comparison showing how a single capybara outweighs 25,000 jerboas. The conversational exchanges between characters ground scientific information in relatable scenarios. McCloskey smartly balances appeal with education, explaining why these South American semi-aquatic mammals make terrible pets despite their friendly appearance. The Level 1 designation (indicating that this tale is ideal for beginning readers) proves optimistic, however. Font sizes fluctuate—at times becoming quite tiny—and complex sentences like “Capybaras eat their poop to digest their food a second time to get more vitamins” will challenge emergent readers. Words such as coprophagia and territory and multiclause constructions will require guidance.
A visually delightful capybara primer best enjoyed as a read-aloud. (Early graphic reader. 5-7)Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781662665776
Page Count: 32
Publisher: TOON Books/Astra Books for Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap.
Budding naturalists who dug We Dig Worms! (2015) will, well, coo over this similarly enlightening accolade.
A curmudgeonly park visitor’s “They’re RATS with wings!” sparks spirited rejoinders from a racially diverse flock of children wearing full-body bird outfits, who swoop down to deliver a mess of pigeon facts. Along with being related to the dodo, “rock doves” fly faster than a car, mate for life, have been crossbred into all sorts of “fancies,” inspired Pablo Picasso to name his daughter “Paloma” in their honor, can be eaten (“Tastes like chicken”), and, like penguins and flamingos, create “pigeon milk” in their crops for their hatchlings. Painted on light blue art paper—“the kind,” writes McCloskey in his afterword, “used by Picasso”—expertly depicted pigeons of diverse breeds common and fancy strut their stuff, with views of the children and other wild creatures, plus occasional helpful labels, interspersed. In the chastened parkgoer’s eyes, as in those of the newly independent readers to whom this is aimed, the often maligned birds are “wonderful.” Cue a fresh set of costumed children on the final page, gearing up to set him straight on squirrels.
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap. (Graphic informational early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935179-93-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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