An awesome odyssey that also makes a telling point, both worthy of repeated iterations.
A ducky’s-eye view of an ocean rapidly becoming more polluted.
Speaking for 28,000 bath toys that were washed overboard on the way from Hong Kong to Seattle in 1992, a yellow plastic duck tells its story—from rolling off first a Chinese assembly line and then later a huge cargo ship at sea to, long afterward, floating at last in a child’s tub after being plucked from the flotsam on a littered beach. This plot may seem familiar to readers of Eve Bunting’s still-in-print Ducky, illustrated by David Wisniewski (1997). What’s new is how, while bobbing over busy ocean depths, past colorful fish and undulating jellies, Motum’s narrator witnesses a whale swallowing a plastic bag, a struggling sea turtle tangled in a fishing net, and the vast swirl of waste plastic dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The author goes for a broad view in both wide-angled illustrations of litter floating or washed ashore and in adding notes about ocean currents, the value as well as hazards of plastics, and other related topics to his urgent message that our oceans are in trouble. A set of activities and organizations at the end add fresh incentive for young recyclers and eco-activists to get off the stick. Workers in early scenes have Asian features; the child and their dad at the end appear to be White.
An awesome odyssey that also makes a telling point, both worthy of repeated iterations. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5362-1772-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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