“This is the ocean, / blue and vast, / that holds the rainwater from the past.” And this is the irresistible refrain of a stunning picture book on the water cycle, written as an innovation on the “This Is the House that Jack Built” pattern of cumulative text, which Schaefer used similarly in This Is the Sunflower (2000). Her rhyming storyline builds with a rhythm as steady as rain on a rooftop, following the cycle of water transformations and adding another element to the text with each refrain. Wattenberg’s (Henny-Penny, 2000, etc.) glowing photographic collage illustrations feature an azure sea and a radiant golden-yellow sky with photos of real storm clouds or a black night sky with starfish stars. Her version of the vast, ancient ocean teems with fish, shells, treasure chests, and muted images of dinosaurs of ages past. Schaefer and Wattenberg have created the essential water-cycle title for younger children, imparting solid scientific information (we’ll forgive the underwater dinosaurs) with memorable text and stunning art. Librarians will want this for story hours with water or rain themes; teachers will want it for water-cycle studies; and kids will want it for its clever rhymes, striking art, and mysterious sunken dinosaurs. As essential to library collections as rain is to summer sunflowers. (Picture book. 4-8)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17039-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard.
A grouchy sapling on a Christmas tree farm finds that there are better things than lights and decorations for its branches.
A Grinch among the other trees on the farm is determined never to become a sappy Christmas tree—and never to leave its spot. Its determination makes it so: It grows gnarled and twisted and needle-less. As time passes, the farm is swallowed by the suburbs. The neighborhood kids dare one another to climb the scary, grumpy-looking tree, and soon, they are using its branches for their imaginative play, the tree serving as a pirate ship, a fort, a spaceship, and a dragon. But in winter, the tree stands alone and feels bereft and lonely for the first time ever, and it can’t look away from the decorated tree inside the house next to its lot. When some parents threaten to cut the “horrible” tree down, the tree thinks, “Not now that my limbs are full of happy children,” showing how far it has come. Happily for the tree, the children won’t give up so easily, and though the tree never wished to become a Christmas tree, it’s perfectly content being a “trick or tree.” Martinez’s digital illustrations play up the humorous dichotomy between the happy, aspiring Christmas trees (and their shoppers) and the grumpy tree, and the diverse humans are satisfyingly expressive.
Just the thing for anyone with a Grinch-y tree of their own in the yard. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-7335-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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