Visually effective; textually lacking.
An accordion-folded introduction to rewilding projects in Yellowstone and elsewhere.
The pages unfold to reveal a single long illustration by Majewski that tracks the recovery of a riverine habitat that starts out stripped by elk but gradually regains both lush greenery and diverse animal life after wolves are reintroduced to prey on them. On the flip side, images of individual wild creatures illustrate brief before-and-after accounts of how select animal populations have been encouraged to recover—mostly in Yellowstone but also in the Alps, where the bearded vulture has made a return; the importance of bison and wild bees to ecosystems is also discussed. The flowing, roughly brushed, painterly art features burgeoning numbers of stylized but recognizable flora and fauna filling the vivid front landscape and, on the back, illustrating a diagrammatic “trophic cascade” or posing alertly in isolation. The impact of the images is only fitfully echoed in the narrative, though, which was originally published in French and suffers from not only what are probably translation issues (in one section elk and deer are used interchangeably, and two consecutive sentences make the same observation), but also fuzzy logic in claiming that the reintroduction of brown bears to the Pyrenees fosters ecotourism but “doesn’t really have an impact on its ecosystem.” (How that even counts as “rewilding” isn’t addressed.) (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Visually effective; textually lacking. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: 9781990252198
Page Count: 44
Publisher: Milky Way Picture Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
Solid interactive fare for younger STEM-winders.
A primary introduction to dinosaurs, with lots of flaps to lift and polysyllabic names to practice.
Melodrama trumps realism in the illustrations, as Shufflebotham picks hues for her stylized figures from the garish end of the palette and depicts most of her dinos in open-mouthed, menacing (if gore-free) poses. In contrast, the variously shaped and sized flaps are mostly used for informational purposes such as adding space for more pictures or transforming a fleshed-out specimen to a skeleton. Not all the dinosaurs are drawn to scale, but to compensate she adds translucent human silhouettes both to the simplified prehistoric backdrops and to some of the inset portraits. Baker’s commentary, divvied up into scattered one- or two-sentence bits, lays a sturdy foundation of fact by offering simply phrased observations about diet, defense, camouflage, and even evolutionary changes while replacing abstract numbers with vivid comparisons. Younger readers will find it hard to forget, for instance, that the teeth of T. rex were “each the size of a banana” or that Gallimimus “was as big as a rhinoceros but faster than a racehorse.” The author follows suit in the co-published Oceans and Seas, illustrated (in a more naturalistic style) by Gareth Lucas, by noting, for instance that “the colossal squid…can be as long as a bus.” Readers might wish for a little more information about some topics, such as just why or how the orca isn’t a whale but belongs to the dolphin family, but she does expand her survey of the oceans with mentions of plastic pollution and of waves as a source of “clean energy.” The movable elements in both outings are either folded from or firmly attached to sturdy stock.
Solid interactive fare for younger STEM-winders. (Informational novelty. 7-9)Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944530-32-7
Page Count: 12
Publisher: 360 Degrees
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
Never leaves the launchpad.
A photo gallery of Martian landforms and surface features, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s powerful HiRISE camera.
A failure in both concept and execution, this set of big, square close-ups not only renders HiRISE’s extraordinarily high-resolution shots as, too often, murky blurs, but pairs them to passages of commentary that don’t consistently mention essentials like scale and location—or even seem to be describing what’s on display. Slade offers just a small wedge of what she vaguely dubs a “colossal crater,” for instance, while leaving viewers to search for invisible “channels in the ice” carved among unexplained hillocks at the Martian south pole and wondering what the dark, brushlike formations that seem to be sticking up from “northern sandy dunes” even are. She just swoons over the planet’s “gorgeous rocky layers” and “lovely linear ridges” while building up to a rhapsodic finale (“completely breathtaking!… / Mars is more amazing than anyone ever imagined!”) in immense type. Capped by a closing timeline that asks readers to believe that Mars was “first discovered” in the 1600s, this outing offers neither the information nor the inspiration of similar photo essays like Seymour Simon’s Mars (1987) and Elizabeth Rusch’s Mighty Mars Rovers (2012).
Never leaves the launchpad. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68263-188-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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