A compelling introduction to a passionate and tenacious Chinese researcher.
A picture-book biography about the persistent Chinese researcher whose medical discovery has saved millions of lives.
In 1969 Tu Youyou, a researcher at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Beijing, was chosen to be a part of a research group to find a cure for chloroquine-resistant malaria. Spread by mosquitoes, this life-threatening disease was making people sick around the world. Using her subject’s given name, Daemicke describes how Youyou’s dedication to both traditional and modern medicines sprang from a life-changing battle with tuberculosis as a teen. In her search for a malaria cure, her observations and openness to traditional remedies led her to the plant qinghao (sweet wormwood). Many experiments failed, but her 191st experiment was finally successful! Youyou led her team to create the medicine artemisinin, also called qinghaosu in Chinese. Her contribution to the project was obscured for decades, but in 2015 she became the first Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize. This inspiring picture-book biography provides a much-needed counterpoint to harmful Sinophobic rhetoric around the origins of Covid-19. Brief text focuses completely on the linear story of Youyou’s dedicated search for a malaria cure, with a mention that during her research, male researchers weren’t happy with her lack of results or her leadership. Round shapes and bright colors create inviting illustrations with cartoonish characters. Nearly all characters are depicted as Chinese.
A compelling introduction to a passionate and tenacious Chinese researcher. (bibliography, author’s note) (Picture book/biography. 5-9)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8075-8111-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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
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