A celebration of unity through variety that’s just right for these divided times
An ebullient tribute to geographic and cultural diversity on this planet.
Bouncy rhyming text takes readers on a whirlwind journey around the globe, always ending with the unifying, titular refrain: “The sun shines everywhere.” Children play and interact in Japan, the United States, India, and more, all basking in warmth and sunshine. White, brown, and black faces appear throughout, including a multiracial family (although they all seem to have rather similar facial features). Lively illustrations feature various religious garments such as a Sikh turban and a Pakistani topi. A similarly global approach to biodiversity depicts cold-weather animals in Antarctica, nocturnal and subterranean animals in the Americas, dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, and more. The text even broadly references a few key historical periods, featuring the Egyptian pyramids, classical Greek philosophers, a medieval castle, and Copernicus. Some depictions make this a less-than-ideal text for STEM learning: Landforms on a freely drawn globe are more suggestions than anything else; puffins are not found in Antarctica. Nevertheless, bright, digitally produced illustrations feature eye-catching, immersive spreads full of children at play amid vivid flowers, a variety of architectural styles, and lots of tiny details that encourage readers to look closer.
A celebration of unity through variety that’s just right for these divided times . (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-52384-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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