A useful guide to avoiding a dangerous bug.
A slim guide that aims to equip children with important information about ticks.
Alex wants to play with her friend José, but José is too sick. Her mother explains that José was bitten by a tick, which gave him a disease that made him tired and weak. Alex’s mother pulls out a book called No Ticks Please to explain where ticks hide, how they transmit diseases and how people can avoid them. The book explains that ticks are often found in “woods, bushes, and tall grasses,” and repeats the phrase often to drive the point home for a young audience. Alex also learns that the remarkably tiny ticks hide in warm, moist spaces and seek out the warm bodies of animals, where they live and drink blood: “The warm body can be a mouse, a chipmunk, or other creatures full of mischief and spunk.” The book-within-a-book is written in an awkward meter, with unnecessary rhymes, but it carries an important message: Yes, you can still go on adventures, but you need to be careful. Fox (No Ticks Please, 2011, etc.) manages to explain something that could potentially alarm children—tiny, vampire-like bugs that carry a debilitating disease—in a straightforward, nonfrightening way. She makes it clear how serious Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses are, but also shows José visiting the doctor, getting better and going back outside to play again. Seven pages of plain-language tips for avoiding ticks and removing them follow the story, with illustrations of campsites, constructions sites, woodpiles and other tick hangouts that will, hopefully, stick with kids. The book is fully illustrated in color, although the humans come off looking a bit stiff. That said, Seward’s illustrations are realistic enough that kids will be able to recognize hard-to-spot ticks if they happen to see one.
A useful guide to avoiding a dangerous bug.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481177320
Page Count: 42
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Stunning, poetic, and playful, this one is a delight for all ages.
A joint introduction to fine art and the importance of sleep.
This exquisite board book will retain its visual value forever—certainly long after children have moved on beyond the format. That said, the simple concepts in this book are conveyed with an elegance, wonder, and joy that complement the artwork perfectly. The book is separated into five thematic sections, each introduced in bold on a bright, monochromatic page with a simple statement or phrase: “Everyone sleeps”; “You need to sleep...”; “If you don’t sleep enough, you may feel...”; “It’s bedtime when...”; and “Dream!” Works reflecting each of these themes follow, as the text amplifies or completes the thought. The consequences of lack of sleep are portrayed by, among others, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, Picasso’s Weeping Woman, and Matisse’s Still Life With Sleeping Woman, which is accompanied by the warning, “But don’t fall asleep in your food!” Other featured artists include, among others, Hiroshige, Takashi Murakami, Diego Rivera, Georgia O’Keefe, Winslow Homer, Jordan Casteel, David Hockney, Keith Haring, Horace Pippen, and Paola Pivi (represented by an installation of life-size, neon, stuffed bears). The portraits included reflect a mix of races, primarily white and black, with one Latinx mother and child and one Asian child.
Stunning, poetic, and playful, this one is a delight for all ages. (Board book. 2-8)Pub Date: May 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7148-7865-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Phaidon
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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