Gorgeous cut-paper collage illustrations cannot outweigh the absence of a story.
First in the Math in Nature series, this prompts readers to imagine animals and plants using numbers to count and arrange themselves.
“Would pronghorns pair up, / line up in a parade, / and prance across the prairie? // With toes like those, / do you suppose / raccoons can count on trouble?” The text attempts some rhythm and rhyme, but it is inconsistent and awkwardly forces the story to conform to the words. Each verse is followed by a separate text box that allows readers to practice a mathematical concept: Counting, ordinal numbers, groups of 10, skip counting, counting down from 10, and halves are among those addressed. Backmatter includes a brief paragraph of information about the featured flora and fauna, but it lacks an answer key. Barron’s artwork is lovely, each spread filled with natural colors, textures and 3-D scenery, but not all are particularly fall-ish. It can also be difficult to distinguish the items to be counted from the backgrounds and to put them into the correct groupings (don’t count across the gutter on the bat page, even though there’s no break in the line of bats!). Finally, Flatt’s conclusion—that nature does not "know" numbers—is just not scientifically accurate. Animals and plants may not count and arrange themselves by number, but that does not mean there is no math in nature.
Gorgeous cut-paper collage illustrations cannot outweigh the absence of a story. (Math picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-926973-36-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A solid, small step for diversifying STEM stories.
What does Annie want to be?
As career day approaches, Annie wants to keep her job choice secret until her family sees her presentation at school. Readers will figure it out, however, through the title and clues Tadgell incorporates into the illustrations. Family members make guesses about her ambitions that are tied to their own passions, although her brother watches as she completes her costume in a bedroom with a Mae Jemison poster, starry décor, and a telescope. There’s a celebratory mood at the culminating presentation, where Annie says she wants to “soar high through the air” like her basketball-playing mother, “explore faraway places” like her hiker dad, and “be brave and bold” like her baker grandmother (this feels forced, but oven mitts are part of her astronaut costume) so “the whole world will hear my exciting stories” like her reporter grandfather. Annie jumps off a chair to “BLAST OFF” in a small illustration superimposed on a larger picture depicting her floating in space with a reddish ground below. It’s unclear if Annie imagines this scene or if it’s her future-self exploring Mars, but either scenario fits the aspirational story. Backmatter provides further reading suggestions and information about the moon and four women astronauts, one of whom is Jemison. Annie and her family are all black.
A solid, small step for diversifying STEM stories. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-88448-523-0
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
This pleasant look at gardening in a city setting reflects a growing trend.
Several inner-city children work together to plant seeds and cultivate their own gardens, transforming their little “anywhere farms” into a lush, green community garden covering a vacant city lot.
A pink-cheeked little girl in overalls receives a single seed from a helpful tan-skinned neighbor on the title page, and she then inspires a flurry of gardening in her neighborhood with children and adults of different ethnicities joining in, including a white boy who uses a wheelchair. The bouncy, rhyming text conveys the basic requirements of growing plants from seeds as well as suggesting a wide variety of unusual containers for growing plants. Several leading questions about the plant growth cycle are interspersed within the story, set in large type on full pages that show a seed gradually sprouting and growing into a huge sunflower on the final, wordless page. The joyful text makes growing flowers and vegetables seem easy, showing plants spilling out of alternative containers as well as more traditional raised beds and the concluding, large garden plot. The text focuses on the titular concept of an “anywhere farm,” without differentiating between farms and gardens, but this conceit is part of the amusing, rollicking tone. Detailed, soft-focus illustrations in mixed media use an autumnal palette of muted green, peach, and tan that don’t quite match the buoyant flavor of the cheerful text.
This pleasant look at gardening in a city setting reflects a growing trend. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7499-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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