A swarm of facts and images about 15 locations spaced all around the globe.
These thronging pages are as busy as a Waldo experience, except the point here is variety. Each location gets a two-page spread highlighting a dozen features that give it character, color, and even whimsy. The locations range from New York to Ulaanbaatar, Alice Springs to Cape Town, Moscow to the Galápagos. Martin’s selection of distinctive features is sure-handed: the doorkeepers of Cairo, the colorful rooftops of Reykjavik, the cheeses and cafes of Paris, the botecos in Rio de Janeiro, the salarymen and ramen noodles of Tokyo. The top-shelf watercolors capture the essence of the thing being described, whether it be Moscow’s stray dogs or New York’s manhole covers (caught in a moody drizzle). Sometimes the short explanations under the name of the object are jokey (“Coffee: Pronounced KAW-fee”), and sometimes they are chock full of information: New Delhi has the “world’s largest fleet of environmentally friendly gas-powered buses”; Arctic terns “travel 44,000 miles every year, the longest migration route of any animal”; and Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing is the busiest in the world, with 100,000 pedestrians per hour. What’s covered is covered well, if glancingly; however, it’s a shame there’s no city from Africa’s beltline (where are Lagos, Nairobi, Kinshasa?), and Rio is the only South American metropolis highlighted.
A playful but incomplete introduction to the cultural geography of far-flung locations. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4521-6514-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The bubble-helmeted feline explains what rockets do and the role they have played in sending people (and animals) into space.
Addressing a somewhat younger audience than in previous outings (Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, 2013, etc.), Astro Cat dispenses with all but a light shower of “factoroids” to describe how rockets work. A highly selective “History of Space Travel” follows—beginning with a crew of fruit flies sent aloft in 1947, later the dog Laika (her dismal fate left unmentioned), and the human Yuri Gagarin. Then it’s on to Apollo 11 in 1969; the space shuttles Discovery, Columbia, and Challenger (the fates of the latter two likewise elided); the promise of NASA’s next-gen Orion and the Space Launch System; and finally vague closing references to other rockets in the works for local tourism and, eventually, interstellar travel. In the illustrations the spacesuited professor, joined by a mouse and cat in similar dress, do little except float in space and point at things. Still, the art has a stylish retro look, and portraits of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford diversify an otherwise all-white, all-male astronaut corps posing heroically or riding blocky, geometric spacecraft across starry reaches.
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-911171-55-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Flying Eye Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Anthropomorphized representations of a person, a place, and a thing introduce readers to nouns.
The protagonists are Person, a green, hairy, Cousin Itt–looking blob; Place, a round, blue, globe-ish being (stereotypically implied female by eyelashes and round pigtails); and Thing, a pink cloud with limbs, a porkpie hat, and red glasses. They first introduce the word “noun” and then start pointing out the nouns that fall under each of their categories. In their speech balloons, these vocabulary words are set in type that corresponds to the speaker’s color: “Each wheel is a thing noun,” says Thing, and “wheel” is set in red. Readers join the three as they visit a museum, pointing out the nouns they see along the way and introducing proper and collective nouns and ways to make nouns plural. Confusingly, though, Person labels the “bus driver” a “person noun” on one page, but two spreads later, Thing says “Abdar is a guard. Mrs. Mooney is a ticket taker. Their jobs are things that are also nouns.” Similarly, a group of athletes is a person noun—“team”—but “flock” and “pack” are things. Lowen’s digital illustrations portray a huge variety of people who display many skin and hair colors, differing abilities, and even religious and/or cultural markers (though no one is overweight). Backmatter includes a summary of noun facts, a glossary, an index (not seen), critical-thinking questions, and a list of further reading. Books on seven other parts of speech release simultaneously.
This ambitious introduction to an important concept tries too hard to pigeonhole people, places, and things . (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5158-4058-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Picture Window Books
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S
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