Apprentice work at best, definitely not ready for prime time.
Amateur production design and underwhelming interactive features only underscore the unusual superficiality of this planetary once-over.
The text and narration can be set at any time to any of five languages plus British or American English, but the good news ends there. Read at a deliberate pace by a narrator who cannot be switched off, the wordy tale endows two 7-year-old twins with a magic globe. It takes them down to the Earth’s core (which Andy somehow spots through solid rock even before they arrive) and up into orbit, where Alice points out features that are not visible on the planet below. In response to a wish to see “different animals,” it deposits them near a camel in an unspecified desert and then in the ocean, where an anglerfish somehow shares its deep-sea habitat with coral, algae and a whale (all of which are also unseen in the illustration). They then travel to a snowy scene into which a polar bear and an Inuit lad slide slowly and rigidly after a few moments. A final wish gathers three children “from all around the world” in casual western dress, plus the Inuit in furs, to share a birthday cake. Consonant with the monotonous background music, wooden writing, scientific misinformation and disconnects between text and pictures, finger taps will make labels appear, and some figures can be induced to move a few inches or blink almost invisibly.
Apprentice work at best, definitely not ready for prime time. (iPad informational app. 6-8)Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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