Excellent nonfiction that has the potential to make reluctant readers beginning bookworms. Not at all stinky! (Informational...
Striking pictures and intriguing facts are paired to entice beginning readers.
Page headings such as “Bird farts” and “Urrp!” and Jenkins’ accurate collage illustrations will draw even reluctant readers in. Information chosen for its “eww” effect will keep them reading despite the challenging vocabulary. Clean, white backgrounds, predictable layout, and varied typefaces help to organize the information. For example, how each critter qualifies as stinky is always discussed in the first paragraph, while callouts explain other behaviors or defense mechanisms. As in earlier series titles, a graphic on each spread indicates scale using either an adult human man or a human hand, while a world map shows habitat. The book concludes with a graphic that shows which critters use smell as a defense or to mark territory and which just live in stinky places. In the similarly formatted Speediest! (published simultaneously), that space is devoted to a chart showing each animal’s speed in miles and kilometers per hour. The aardvark’s 1/10 mph may seem unimpressive until readers see the explanation that this is how fast the animal can dig into earth. The quick movements of the mantis shrimp and the Panamanian termite are compared (quite favorably) to the blink of an eye. Backmatter in each volume includes a one-page glossary and a bibliography of more comprehensive nonfiction published between 1991 and 2015.
Excellent nonfiction that has the potential to make reluctant readers beginning bookworms. Not at all stinky! (Informational early reader. 5-10)Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-544-94478-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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PROFILES
A quick flight but a blast from first to last.
A charged-up roundup of astro-facts.
Having previously explored everything awesome about both dinosaurs (2019) and sharks (2020), Lowery now heads out along a well-traveled route, taking readers from the Big Bang through a planet-by-planet tour of the solar system and then through a selection of space-exploration highlights. The survey isn’t unique, but Lowery does pour on the gosh-wow by filling each hand-lettered, poster-style spread with emphatic colors and graphics. He also goes for the awesome in his selection of facts—so that readers get nothing about Newton’s laws of motion, for instance, but will come away knowing that just 65 years separate the Wright brothers’ flight and the first moon landing. They’ll also learn that space is silent but smells like burned steak (according to astronaut Chris Hadfield), that thanks to microgravity no one snores on the International Space Station, and that Buzz Aldrin was the first man on the moon…to use the bathroom. And, along with a set of forgettable space jokes (OK, one: “Why did the carnivore eat the shooting star?” “Because it was meteor”), the backmatter features drawing instructions for budding space artists and a short but choice reading list. Nods to Katherine Johnson and NASA’s other African American “computers” as well as astronomer Vera Rubin give women a solid presence in the otherwise male and largely White cast of humans. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A quick flight but a blast from first to last. (Informational picture book. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-35974-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
More thoughtful, sometimes exhilarating encounters with nature.
In a new entry in the Over and Under series, a paddleboarder glimpses humpback whales leaping, floats over a populous kelp forest, and explores life on a beach and in a tide pool.
In this tale inspired by Messner’s experiences in Monterey Bay in California, a young tan-skinned narrator, along with their light-skinned mom and tan-skinned dad, observes in quiet, lyrical language sights and sounds above and below the sea’s serene surface. Switching perspectives and angles of view and often leaving the family’s red paddleboards just tiny dots bobbing on distant swells, Neal’s broad seascapes depict in precise detail bat stars and anchovies, kelp bass, and sea otters going about their business amid rocky formations and the swaying fronds of kelp…and, further out, graceful moon jellies and—thrillingly—massive whales in open waters beneath gliding pelicans and other shorebirds. After returning to the beach at day’s end to search for shells and to spot anemones and decorator crabs, the child ends with nighttime dreams of stars in the sky meeting stars in the sea. Appended nature notes on kelp and 21 other types of sealife fill in details about patterns and relationships in this rich ecosystem. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
More thoughtful, sometimes exhilarating encounters with nature. (author’s note, further reading) (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-79720-347-8
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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