Light in tone but not content, an imaginative way to map comings and goings in the natural world.
For young naturalists, an invitation to guide 14 animals through migratory rounds.
Castrillón (The Balcony, 2019) casts each route as a wandering maze through uncrowded landscapes or waterways, with a red flag showing where to start, a checkered flag at the midway point, and explanatory notes and prompts placed throughout. The animals range from the far-traveling likes of humpback whales and Arctic terns to the red crabs of Christmas Island, which scuttle out of the rainforest to mate on the shore and “flick their eggs into the sea.” “Migration” is defined broadly enough to include the daily ups and downs (“diel vertical migration”) of Antarctic krill and loosely enough to include the peregrinations of polar bears along with annual journeys such as that of Zambia’s straw-colored fruit bats or the sockeye salmon’s once-in-a-lifetime odyssey. Obliquely acknowledging the often high attrition rates with occasional skulls or scatterings of bones, she recognizes the hazards migratory species face. Her animals are small cartoon figures that generally smile and often even cavort friskily about while both animal and human predators lurk on the sidelines watching. Piecemeal though it is, the narrative will leave younger readers with a basic grounding in the concept, and the mazes are simple enough that the visual key to their routes at the end may go unneeded.
Light in tone but not content, an imaginative way to map comings and goings in the natural world. (Informational novelty. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0853-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Big Picture/Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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
A winning heads up for younger readers just becoming aware of the wider natural world.
An appeal to share concern for 12 familiar but threatened, endangered, or critically endangered animal species.
The subjects of Marino’s intimate, close-up portraits—fairly naturalistically rendered, though most are also smiling, glancing up at viewers through human eyes, and posed at rest with a cute youngling on lap or flank—steal the show. Still, Clinton’s accompanying tally of facts about each one’s habitat and daily routines, to which the title serves as an ongoing refrain, adds refreshingly unsentimental notes: “A single giraffe kick can kill a lion!”; “[S]hivers of whale sharks can sense a drop of blood if it’s in the water nearby, though they eat mainly plankton.” Along with tucking in collective nouns for each animal (some not likely to be found in major, or any, dictionaries: an “embarrassment” of giant pandas?), the author systematically cites geographical range, endangered status, and assumed reasons for that status, such as pollution, poaching, or environmental change. She also explains the specific meaning of “endangered” and some of its causes before closing with a set of doable activities (all uncontroversial aside from the suggestion to support and visit zoos) and a list of international animal days to celebrate.
A winning heads up for younger readers just becoming aware of the wider natural world. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-51432-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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