Challenging but illuminating.
A pithy appreciation in rhyme of light and light-related phenomena.
For all the sometimes extreme terseness of her lines—not to mention the impression of simplicity that Yang imparts in his stylized scenes of small, dot-eyed, round-headed figures posing on a beach and at a campground, looking at fireflies and stars, peering through a microscope and a telescope, holding a flashlight here, there an umbrella—Schaefer takes a conceptually rich, STEM-centric approach to the topic: “Prisms and raindrops / both refract light, / which helps form rainbows— / an optical delight!” Along with pointing to select sources of light from the sun to fireworks, she explains the difference between transparent and opaque and distinguishes natural light from artificial (the latter being “made by man,” a quaintly sexist formulation she even uses twice). Though she leaves most of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond the visible wavelengths unmentioned, she does direct a nod to X-rays. If less enlightened readers and audiences are going to need more help unpacking her denser lyrics than she provides in the hardly more expansive glossary at the end, still the informational load enriches the observational one, and a proper sense of appreciation for her topic consistently shines through. The toylike human figures are diverse in skin hue. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Challenging but illuminating. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9780062457110
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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