A glimpse of the wilder side of wild nature, though the actual crunching and munching remain offstage.
A pop-up survey of wildlife in Arctic, Antarctic, and tundra habitats.
In both art and narrative, food and family are definitely the prevailing themes. Here, an emperor penguin horks up a meal for his offspring while a southern giant petrel lurks nearby, hoping to snatch up a chick; there, pulling a tab dumps a basking seal into the water, where a pod of hungry orcas awaits. Elsewhere, moving a slider brings a newborn humpback whale into the world, a pop-up polar bear and her cub hover over holes in an ice floe, and Laboucarie informs readers that a leopard seal “would gladly munch on a penguin.” An arctic fox stalks a lemming in winter and in summer thanks to a double-gatefold view of the same tundra landscape in both seasons. Still, the carnage remains implicit, because for all the references to diet and predation, none of the animals here are actually depicted chowing down on one another. In a well-meaning if only marginally relevant gesture, four bundled-up children—one with brown skin, three with pale—play with toy cold-weather creatures on the title spread. They are not seen again and are the only human figures.
A glimpse of the wilder side of wild nature, though the actual crunching and munching remain offstage. (Informational pop-up picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 979-1-02760-878-2
Page Count: 14
Publisher: Twirl/Chronicle
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit.
The bubble-helmeted feline explains what rockets do and the role they have played in sending people (and animals) into space.
Addressing a somewhat younger audience than in previous outings (Professor Astro Cat’s Frontiers of Space, 2013, etc.), Astro Cat dispenses with all but a light shower of “factoroids” to describe how rockets work. A highly selective “History of Space Travel” follows—beginning with a crew of fruit flies sent aloft in 1947, later the dog Laika (her dismal fate left unmentioned), and the human Yuri Gagarin. Then it’s on to Apollo 11 in 1969; the space shuttles Discovery, Columbia, and Challenger (the fates of the latter two likewise elided); the promise of NASA’s next-gen Orion and the Space Launch System; and finally vague closing references to other rockets in the works for local tourism and, eventually, interstellar travel. In the illustrations the spacesuited professor, joined by a mouse and cat in similar dress, do little except float in space and point at things. Still, the art has a stylish retro look, and portraits of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford diversify an otherwise all-white, all-male astronaut corps posing heroically or riding blocky, geometric spacecraft across starry reaches.
Energetic enough to carry younger rocketeers off the launch pad if not into a very high orbit. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-911171-55-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Flying Eye Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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