A sketchy teaser in search of an audience.
A subatomic narrator describes how helium, a nonrenewable resource, is formed deep underground.
The very simple cartoon style of the illustrations suggests a breezier ride than the scientifically challenging content delivers. With much reliance on explanatory endnotes, Rooney sends her zippy narrator—newly freed from a popped balloon (see Eddie the Electron, 2015)—barreling its way past billions of nitrogen and oxygen atoms to the top of the atmosphere. Eddie describes how uranium and thorium trapped in the newly formed planet’s crust self-destructed to leave helium as a stable byproduct. Billions of tedious years later (“I thought I would die of pair annihilation!”) that helium was extracted for a wide variety of industrial uses. Following mentions of Einstein and how Eddie is mysteriously connected to other atoms “in a way that surpasses space and time,” the popeyed purple particle floats off with a plea to cut down on the party balloons to conserve a rare element. Younger readers may find this last notion easier to latch onto than the previous dose of physics, which is seriously marred both by the vague allusions and by Eddie’s identification as a helium atom rather than the free electron that his portrayals in the art, not to mention his moniker, indicate.
A sketchy teaser in search of an audience. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-14-0
Page Count: 27
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide.
Barr and Williams present 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, from the Big Bang to the International Space Station and, possibly soon, flights beyond.
The co-authors write with the same enthusiasm and energy they showed in telling The Story of Life (2015) but with less regard for accuracy or internal logic. Following an inherently paradoxical opening claim that “Before the Big Bang there was….[n]o time,” they go on with a sweeping survey of the cosmos. It offers a picture of galaxies “sparkling silently” (wrong on both counts) in “bitterly cold” space (likewise wrong: space has no temperature), with incomplete references to the “freezing” atmospheres of our solar system’s other planets (Venus’ 462 C average temperature goes unmentioned) and the “cold, dusty moon” orbiting Earth (cold only on the side away from the sun). Two space-suited young explorers, one light-skinned, one dark, float through painted illustrations that progress from mighty explosions and swirling starscapes to closely packed planets, fleets of early spacecraft, a cloud of satellites, and, finally, space liners ferrying multicultural tour groups to an orbiting hotel, or maybe Mars.
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78603-003-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
Unmeasured nonsense.
Introductions to select common units of length, mass/weight, and intensity.
Clean page design and a tidily diverse cast of cartoon measurers and observers illustrating each example dress up but can’t disguise a narrative that is marred with errors, arbitrary entries, and oversimplifications. The misinformation begins with a claim that intergalactic—and, a few pages later, interstellar—distances are measured in astronomical units. It then goes on to define “month” as “the amount of time it takes the Moon to orbit the Earth, or about 30 days,” aver that “fortnight” is being used more and more by “Yanks,” and list the indeterminate “eon” as a unit of measure just like “year” and “millennium.” Fiedler explains the more or less self-evident term “light-year” but not “parsec” (in an entry that does not take the time to clear up the confusion about AUs) and correctly but uselessly suggests that doughnuts as well as molecules can be numbered in “moles.” She also neglects to mention that the boiling point of water varies with altitude or that decibels and Richter scale numbers are logarithmic. A stereotypically dressed Mexican sampling hot peppers for the Scoville scale and a penguin posing next to an igloo at the South Pole sour Kearney’s generally comical art.
Unmeasured nonsense. (abbreviated table of conversions) (Nonfiction. 7-9)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63322-297-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Walter Foster Jr.
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
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