Cartoon humor and solid information make an appealing introduction to an impressive bird family.
Hawks star in this sixth episode of Eaton’s The Truth About Your Favorite Animals series.
The author uses familiar North American species to illustrate hawks’ hunting behavior, family life, migration, and threats. Text on the page gives the facts while the various hawks, a brown-skinned bird-watcher, a threatened vole, and a sky-gliding Dall sheep provide commentary. As in previous books, there are also signpostlike text boxes with further facts along the way. The author has a knack for picking facts his young readers will enjoy: “Baby hawks often go to the bathroom over the edge of the nest instead of in it.” But they will also come away knowing the more general characteristics of the hawk family—the excellent vision, hooked beak, strong, sharp-taloned toes, large wings, and special tail feathers that make them such deadly hunters—and much more. Although the illustrations are cartoons, and sometimes wildly out of proportion (a fox taller than the human child), the hawk species are both actually recognizable and usually labeled on the page. It should be easy for readers to distinguish fact from exaggeration, and the humor may make the science stick. The backmatter includes illustrations of wingspans, air movements that help them fly, migratory routes, and suggestions, both easy and challenging, for further reading.
Cartoon humor and solid information make an appealing introduction to an impressive bird family. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19845-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet and endearing feathered migration.
A relationship between a Latina grandmother and her mixed-race granddaughter serves as the frame to depict the ruby-throated hummingbird migration pattern.
In Granny’s lap, a girl is encouraged to “keep still” as the intergenerational pair awaits the ruby-throated hummingbirds with bowls of water in their hands. But like the granddaughter, the tz’unun—“the word for hummingbird in several [Latin American] languages”—must soon fly north. Over the next several double-page spreads, readers follow the ruby-throated hummingbird’s migration pattern from Central America and Mexico through the United States all the way to Canada. Davies metaphorically reunites the granddaughter and grandmother when “a visitor from Granny’s garden” crosses paths with the girl in New York City. Ray provides delicately hashed lines in the illustrations that bring the hummingbirds’ erratic flight pattern to life as they travel north. The watercolor palette is injected with vibrancy by the addition of gold ink, mirroring the hummingbirds’ flashing feathers in the slants of light. The story is supplemented by notes on different pages with facts about the birds such as their nest size, diet, and flight schedule. In addition, a note about ruby-throated hummingbirds supplies readers with detailed information on how ornithologists study and keep track of these birds.
A sweet and endearing feathered migration. (bibliography, index) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0538-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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