BLUE PLANET

Broad overviews of both the water cycle and the varieties of life in waters fresh and salty.

In simple language broken up into one- or two-sentence blocks, Butterfield leads a tour of our planet’s five oceans and select biomes at their edges and various depths, then moves on to the four largest rivers and a half-dozen named representative lakes. A spread of boats and another of aquatic homes on various continents acknowledge human use, capped by glances at a community well and a water-treatment plant that lead to a final appeal not to waste or spoil our “sparkling treasure!” Woodward crowds most of the natural locales with characteristic wildlife, much of it seen close up, all reasonably accurately rendered in what looks like layered, painted paper collage. Human figures are rare and distant but seem to be matched to their diverse locales. In the co-published Green Planet: Life in Our Woods and Forests, the scene shifts to woodsy settings for basic pictures of tree types and metabolism plus glimpses of rainforest insects and spider monkeys, grizzly bears in snowy boreal forests, owls and other residents of deciduous woods, and arboreal human dwellings (albeit with no humans in sight).

A serviceable early introduction to watery environments and some of their residents, wild and otherwise.