In cartoon panels, the inimitable Williams offers snapshots of ancient Rome from the mythological creation of the universe to the fall of the empire.
Lightly salting her account with Latin quips (“In theobroma cacao fidemus!”), Williams pens a semiserious narrative history broken up into bite-sized bits on single-topic spreads (“The Gruesome Gauls”). She illustrates them with small cartoon scenes that depict significant incidents or scenes of daily life. Dropping side comments and the occasional Res vera (“fact”) as he goes, a dozy dormouse aptly named Dormeo Augustus squires young readers along. He leads them past the major gods, the tale of Romulus and Remus, Rome’s first seven kings, the Republic, the Caesars and a select few other emperors. There are side excursions to the Forum and a crowded bath, plus glimpses of patrician and plebeian life, slavery, gladiators and the renowned Roman army. Though a certain amount of mayhem makes its way into her account, the author tones down the worst excesses (as Dormeo puts it, the Sabine women were “treated most cruelly”—that’s one way to put it) or acknowledges them only in passing. Not a very detailed picture, but broad enough to leave younger readers with a general sense of how grand the grandeur was. (Informational picture book. 8-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6581-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
A sensitive, discussable access point for children learning about Holocaust history.
The brave work of Irena Sendler, one of the righteous gentiles of World War II, is succinctly depicted in this new picture book.
“There are two kinds of people in this world, good and bad.” As a child, wise words from her father gave Irena a guiding principle to live by and prompted the adult Sendler to find ways to save 2,500 innocent Jewish children and babies from the horror of their Holocaust fate. She worked with a network of smugglers and shelters to hide them in carpentry boxes, vegetable sacks, and laundry piles, transporting them to orphanages and the homes of willing Christian foster families, recording the children’s names so they could be found later and burying her lists in the titular jars. And when she herself was imprisoned by the Nazis, Zegota, the Polish resistance group, bribed guards to free her so she could continue her important work. Digital and traditional art in opaque dark browns and grays illustrates the sinister period and shadowy existence of these saved children. Roy’s chronological narrative concentrates on the period from 1940 to 1944 and stresses Sendler’s heroism; it also includes invented scenes and dialogue, marking it as fiction.
A sensitive, discussable access point for children learning about Holocaust history. (afterword, author’s note, glossary, index, source notes) (Picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-425-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Fine viewing, but more of an art exhibit than a systematic family history.
Recently discovered hints that most dinosaurs may have been feathered cap a gallery of prehistoric predecessors to today’s birds.
The presentation has more of a cobbled-together feel than Guiberson’s previous look at the deep past, The Greatest Dinosaur Ever (illustrated by Gennady Spirin, 2013). Despite the title, the book goes beyond feathers. Guiberson discusses how the colors of fossilized feathers can be deduced from the shapes of their microscopic melanosomes, but she also describes early appearances of other avian features such as wishbones and a two-legged stance. But that anatomical focus doesn’t extend to the illustrations, as in the dimly lit paintings, dinosaurs loom indistinctly, their colors muted and limbs tightly folded or otherwise angled so that structural details are hard to make out. Eoalulavis appears only as a few tiny figures winging past a pair of immense sauropods, and the towering ornithischian confronting a modern ostrich on the final spread isn’t identified at all. The portraits are arranged in rough chronological order, but there are no clues in text or pictures to the dinosaurs’ specific eras. Despite a reference to the “teeny wings” of Hesperornis and a few other breaks in tone, the author’s commentary is otherwise solid…until its grand but insupportable closing claim that birds now inhabit “every environment on Earth.”
Fine viewing, but more of an art exhibit than a systematic family history. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 8-10)Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9828-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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