A cogent reminder of the significance of plants, for oxygen breathers of all species.
A basic introduction to the role plants play in supplying oxygen and trapping excess carbon dioxide.
Davies has a simple message to deliver. To get there, she first takes a close look at leaf structure and photosynthesis, then goes back four billion years to retrace the development of life from the first green microorganisms to the Carboniferous Period and the formation of fossil fuels. Today, she writes, our planet is covered with “great green nations” of plants that work with fauna and fungi to lock back up the carbon we’ve thoughtlessly released over the past few centuries, which is heating the planet and “messing up the weather.” But those natural communities, threatened by habitat destruction and plastic pollution, need our assistance. Readers will have to look elsewhere for hints about concrete ways to help, but our urgent need to act comes through loud and clear. Over a running timeline, Sutton fashions land- and seascapes teeming with plants and animals (or, in one urban vista, cars and smoke-belching factories) on the way to final views of racially diverse children climbing a tree, including a light-skinned youngster who stays behind to reflect on the author’s conclusion: “GREEN is the most important color in the world.”
A cogent reminder of the significance of plants, for oxygen breathers of all species. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781536231410
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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