Adorable babies (is there any other kind?), mostly white but some with darker skin, cavort on different-colored backgrounds to a pretty standard doggerel praisesong: “Lovely baby, / wiggly toes, / stops to smell / a sweet RED rose.” And so on. Given the appeal of photographs of other babies to the target audience and the penetration of the Rachael Hale® brand, this is likely to reach out to a broad readership. The subtlety of some of the color differentiations (orange and yellow are awfully close in hue) and busyness of other compositions demonstrates, however, that the board-book dollar would still be better spent on the fortuitously timed reprint of Margaret Miller’s I Love Colors. (6-12 mos.)
Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-316-04452-3
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS
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Not only does Jenkins (Life on Earth, 2002, etc.) again display a genius for creating paper-collage wildlife portraits with astonishingly realistic skin, fur, and feathers, but here on alternate spreads he zooms in for equally lifelike close-ups of ears, eyes, noses, mouths, feet, and tails. Five examples of each organ thrusting in from beyond the pages’ edges for each “What do you do” question precede spreads in which the point of view pulls back to show the whole animal, with a short accompanying caption. Visual surprises abound: a field cricket’s ears are actually on its legs; a horned lizard can (and does, here) squirt blood from its eyes as a defense mechanism; in an ingenious use of page design, a five-lined skink’s breakable tail enters and leaves the center gutter at different points. Capped by a systematic appendix furnishing more, and often arresting, details—“A humpback whale can be 50 feet long and weigh a ton per foot”—this array of wide eyes and open mouths will definitely have viewers responding with wide eyes and open mouths of their own. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-9)
Pub Date: March 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-25628-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
Categories: CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Can this really be the first time readers meet the Legendary Alston Boys of Logan County? Cousins and veteran sleuths Otto and Sheed Alston show us that we are the ones who are late to their greatness.
These two black boys are coming to terms with the end of their brave, heroic summer at Grandma’s, with a return to school just right around the corner. They’ve already got two keys to the city, but the rival Epic Ellisons—twin sisters Wiki and Leen—are steadily gaining celebrity across Logan County, Virginia, and have in hand their third key to the city. No way summer can end like this! These young people are powerful, courageous, experienced adventurers molded through their heroic commitment to discipline and deduction. They’ve got their shared, lifesaving maneuvers committed to memory (printed in a helpful appendix) and ready to save any day. Save the day they must, as a mysterious, bendy gentleman and an oversized, clingy platypus have been unleashed on the city of Fry, and all the residents and their belongings seem to be frozen in time and place. Will they be able to solve this one? With total mastery, Giles creates in Logan County an exuberant vortex of weirdness, where the commonplace sits cheek by jowl with the utterly fantastic, and populates it with memorable characters who more than live up to their setting.
This can’t be the last we ever hear of the Legendary Alston Boys of the purely surreal Logan County—imaginative, thrill-seeking readers, this is a series to look out for. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-46083-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Versify/HMH
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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PERSPECTIVES
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