Chocolate-chip cookies may come from Grandma’s oven, but their ingredients come from all over the world, as a pair of exuberant animal researchers finds out. While twinkly Grandma bustles about the kitchen, Bush’s sunny illustrations take her excitable dog and cerebral cat much further afield: First to Vermont and Hawaii to see how butter and sugar are created; then to Madagascar for vanilla extract; on to salt pans near San Francisco, a Kansas wheat field and less defined locations for eggs and chocolate. Laced with captions, paragraphs of information and exclamations, the visual gustatory odyssey ends with a map (properly showing that some ingredients can be from several places), a caution against feeding chocolate to pets, a proffered plate of finished cookies—and the requisite recipe to finish it all off. Shelve next to Marjorie Priceman’s How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World (1994), and turn even more young gourmands into globetrotters. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-009092-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2006
An unpalatable mess left half-baked by an ill-conceived gimmick.
Modeling a classic nursery song, a black hole does what a black hole does.
Ferrie reverses the song’s customary little-to-large order and shows frequent disregard for such niceties as actual rhymes and regular metrics. Also playing fast and loose with internal logic, she tracks a black hole as it cumulatively chows down, Pac-Man–style, on the entire universe, then galaxies (“It left quite a cavity after swallowing that galaxy”), stars, planets, cells, molecules, atoms, neutrons, and finally the ultimate: “There was a black hole that swallowed a quark. / That’s all there was. / And now it’s dark.” Then, in a twist that limits the audience for this feature to aging hippies and collectors of psychedelic posters, the author enjoins viewers to turn a black light (not supplied) onto the pages and flip back through for “an entirely different story.” What that might be, or even whether a filtered light source would work as well as a UV bulb, is left to anybody’s guess. The black hole and most of its victims sport roly-poly bodies and comically dismayed expressions in Batori’s cartoon illustrations—the universe in its entirety goes undepicted, unsurprisingly, and the quark never does appear, in the visible spectrum at least. This anthropomorphization adds a slapstick element that does nothing to pull the physics and the premise together.
An unpalatable mess left half-baked by an ill-conceived gimmick. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8077-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
With hand-colored photos of grave children holding, sitting on, or clambering over rocks, Christian (Chocolate, A Glacier Grizzly, 1997) poetically suggests picking up pebbles to see if they are skipping rocks or scraping rocks, wishing rocks or worry rocks, or perhaps just rocks with marvelous things in or under them. Lember (The Shell Book, 1997) adds muted but natural-looking tints to soften the lines in her woodsy, idyllic outdoor scenes. Like Meredith Hooper's Pebble in My Pocket (not reviewed), this suggests to children the rewards of taking closer looks at these most commonplace of natural objects. (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-239339-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2000
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