Truck-lovers will beg for repeat reads, with little ones “reading along” from memory
When an ice cream truck breaks down, a truck traffic jam ensues: the perfect attraction for the vehicle-obsessed in this captivating counting book.
From cement mixer to garbage truck, the trucks pile up—and so does the crowd—as a young bicyclist names and numbers the vehicles in rhyming text. “I start to count each truck I see. / First 1, then 2, and now there are 3.” The use of numerals in the text encourages number recognition and creates a matching game, while spelled numbers are used when appropriate. The yellow-helmeted boy weaves through the action until the solution is clear: the crane truck! His idea saves the day, and with traffic flowing once more, all ends on a deliciously sweet note. Digital illustrations done in a muted pastel palette present an amiable city block as Cyrus takes readers on a cinematic tour of the locale. His strength is in how he uses the boy’s point of view to expand readers’ understanding of the environment, allowing both character and readers to find an answer to the problem. Various perspectives capture the imagination, but the trucks are the real stars of the show.
Truck-lovers will beg for repeat reads, with little ones “reading along” from memory . (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5809-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Science books for the young can and should do better than this.
This new offering from the Tate Gallery’s publishing arm asks simple questions about visual perception, challenging readers to make judgments about relationships between familiar objects.
The subjects are varied: the view of the ground from a plane or tall building; the comparison between different tall objects such as a tree, crane, or high-rise vs. a dinosaur; a variety of tiny things, such as a speck of dirt, an ant’s foot, or a pinhole in a shirt; as well as views through a microscope or inside an old TV. Some of the examples are apposite, but some seem rather lame, such as the filling from the middle of a pillow. The apparent intention, to teach simple science concepts, is let down by the illustrations, which consist of bold, flat, textured geometric shapes, often close-ups of faces and hands, which although diverse in skin color, are not the best medium for explaining the concepts under discussion. Worse, the illustrations are mostly imaginary, such as animals under a microscope with eyes, and the inside of a TV full of playful but unrealistic spools and threads.
Science books for the young can and should do better than this. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-84976-349-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tate/Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
A deceptively simple, joyous introduction to set theory, with lots of other concept practice as a bonus.
Sam’s got a mess, but he knows how to have fun cleaning it up: sorting it!
Brown-skinned Sam stands in front of his “heap” of toys, an exuberantly colorful pile that stands out against the muted, neutral backgrounds in Jocelyn’s collage illustrations. “First he finds Obo the robot, one of a kind. Then two snarling dinosaurs, three little boxes, and four fake foods. How many things is that?” From this simple opening, Jocelyn takes Sam and readers through many permutations of organizational possibilities for his stuff: rocks, round things, things that come in twos; things that are striped; things that are soft or fuzzy or smelly; and so on. Each double-page spread offers at least one sorting possibility and myriad opportunities for involvement. Items that rhyme are paired visually but not textually, inviting readers to vocalize “cat” and “bat,” “fox” and “box.” The homely hodgepodge of media—photographs, spare drawings, intricate paper-collage—combines with open-ended questions (“What else floats?”) to practically beg readers to look outside the book for examples from their own lives to add to Sam’s categories or start their own. Layouts are varied and inventive; early on, baker’s twine makes an elegant Venn diagram, and later, a Pac-Man maze includes both “things Sam bites” and “some things [that] bite Sam.”
A deceptively simple, joyous introduction to set theory, with lots of other concept practice as a bonus. (Picture book. 3-5)Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-91805-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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