A comprehensive and detailed anatomy lesson for young readers.
Charbonneau’s debut picture book uses medical terms and diagrams to explain the human body.
After noting the wide variety of hair that people can have, the book’s third-person narrator identifies the scalp, hair shaft, and root. The work goes on to explore the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth. Regarding the chest, the work mentions that some people grow breasts. Next are the hands, arms, and abdomen, and, later, legs, feet, and toes, among other parts. In an author’s note, Charbonneau writes that she unsuccessfully searched for a picture book for her son that “discussed genitals the same way as other body parts,” so she consulted with other parents, child-safety experts, pediatricians, gender specialists, and professional educators before writing this one, which illustrates and labels the parts of the penis and vagina in detail. (There are no sexual or reproductive explanations included.) Overall, the work will be useful for parents who want to explain complete and proper anatomy to their kids, including lesser-known parts, such as the tragus and helix of the ear. It also takes care to note a range of human experience, such as that “Some people are Deaf and cannot hear.” Iver’s full-color, painterly illustrations depict diverse children with different skin tones; one boy wears eyeglasses, and one girl uses a prosthetic leg.
A comprehensive and detailed anatomy lesson for young readers.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-955619-00-4
Page Count: 46
Publisher: Arctic Flower Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it.
A succession of animal dads do their best to teach their young to say “Dada” in this picture-book vehicle for Fallon.
A grumpy bull says, “DADA!”; his calf moos back. A sad-looking ram insists, “DADA!”; his lamb baas back. A duck, a bee, a dog, a rabbit, a cat, a mouse, a donkey, a pig, a frog, a rooster, and a horse all fail similarly, spread by spread. A final two-spread sequence finds all of the animals arrayed across the pages, dads on the verso and children on the recto. All the text prior to this point has been either iterations of “Dada” or animal sounds in dialogue bubbles; here, narrative text states, “Now everybody get in line, let’s say it together one more time….” Upon the turn of the page, the animal dads gaze round-eyed as their young across the gutter all cry, “DADA!” (except the duckling, who says, “quack”). Ordóñez's illustrations have a bland, digital look, compositions hardly varying with the characters, although the pastel-colored backgrounds change. The punch line fails from a design standpoint, as the sudden, single-bubble chorus of “DADA” appears to be emanating from background features rather than the baby animals’ mouths (only some of which, on close inspection, appear to be open). It also fails to be funny.
Plotless and pointless, the book clearly exists only because its celebrity author wrote it. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00934-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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