Just right for both first-time visitors as well as fans of the city.
Noted artist Thurlby applies his creative sense of design to an alphabet of New York City.
Readers will be immediately struck by the artist’s distinctive style, which uses mixed media and digital techniques to represent the famous sights of the Big Apple. The flat dimensions and striking use of color fashion vintage-poster–like depictions for each iconic image. The marked diversity of the people depicted is anything but vintage, happily. From the American Museum of Natural History to the Bronx Zoo, none of the selected letter pairings, each represented on a double-page spread, is a stretch, which happens too often in themed ABC books. D for “Downtown Manhattan” illustrates Chinatown; the Empire State Building and “ice skating” at Rockefeller Center require 90-degree rotations for full appreciation; N is the New York Public Library; Q is for Queens; V is for “the Village”; X is for the “New York Stock EXchange”; and Y for Yankee Stadium, of course. Best of all is a Where’s Waldo–esque device in which King Kong himself appears in every scene, sometimes large or sometimes teeny. Sharp eyes will detect him in the crowd at Grand Central, enjoying the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, piloting a plane at JFK, and jogging Uptown outside the Guggenheim Museum. Naturally, he has his own page for the letter K.
Just right for both first-time visitors as well as fans of the city. (Picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-5465-0
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In a word: Wonderful.
A spelling-bee champ welcomes readers to the zesty, awesome world of wording wizardry.
Whether you recite it from A to Z or in reverse, the alphabet’s cool, not to mention the words you can build by combining its letters in myriad ways. Such is the premise of this cheerful book that lists 26 empowering words, from Z to A—Avant-garde’s own initials—each beginning with a different letter of the alphabet (except X, for which extraordinary subs). Each word is a favorite of the teen author, who in 2021 became the first African American to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee. The word list begins and ends with the author’s own names (Zaila, meaning “mighty, powerful,” and Avant-garde, “to be at the forefront”). On each page, the same word appears three to five times, printed in boldfaced type, alongside brief, thought-provoking, upbeat observations. The words cavort spiritedly on the page in hyphenated form (“L-A-U-G-H-T-E-R,” “K-I-N-D-N-E-S-S”), inviting readers to draw their pronunciations out slowly, as if to playfully savor their “feel.” A pithy quotation from luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Sitting Bull, and Shakira accompanies each word. Energetic, bold illustrations featuring dynamic patterns and characters diverse in skin tone, age, and physical ability greatly enliven the book. Readers should be strongly encouraged to create personal word lists and commentaries. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
In a word: Wonderful. (the origins of Zaila’s words of wonder) (Picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: June 27, 2023
ISBN: 9780593568934
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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