A decent overview that’s more approachable than a textbook.
A basic introduction to the properties and measurement of sound.
A short-haired, brown-skinned child and a dog with a bandanna around its neck serve as cheerful guides through informal informational text and textured, cartoon illustrations. Everyday scenes, like a busy city street, appear alongside more fanciful ones, like a dog-versus-child drag race. Descriptions of various sounds lead into explanations of sound’s forms and functions as well as related facts about animals (for example, bats use echolocation) and prompts for experiments that readers can do on their own (like feeling for vibrations in your neck when you hum). Concentric circles and repeated curves help readers spot sound waves in every situation. The content is broader than it is deep: While it doesn’t contain a complete physical description of a pressure wave, for instance, it does have a simple basic explanation of how sounds travel from the world into our brains. It doesn’t diagram human inner ear bones, either, but it does feature a nifty graph of the hearing ranges of 12 different animals. One notable misstep is the spread about decibels, which fails to communicate that this measure of sound’s power doesn’t increase in linear fashion; 20 dB is not 10 plus louder than 10 dB, but 10 times louder. That’s pretty important for readers trying to follow the recommendation “To keep your ears safe, stay away from really loud noise”! (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A decent overview that’s more approachable than a textbook. (activity, glossary) (Informational picture book. 5-10)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5253-0250-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
Artfully cropped animal portraits challenge viewers to guess which end they’re seeing.
In what will be a crowd-pleasing and inevitably raucous guessing game, a series of close-up stock photos invite children to call out one of the titular alternatives. A page turn reveals answers and basic facts about each creature backed up by more of the latter in a closing map and table. Some of the posers, like the tail of an okapi or the nose on a proboscis monkey, are easy enough to guess—but the moist nose on a star-nosed mole really does look like an anus, and the false “eyes” on the hind ends of a Cuyaba dwarf frog and a Promethea moth caterpillar will fool many. Better yet, Lavelle saves a kicker for the finale with a glimpse of a small parasitical pearlfish peeking out of a sea cucumber’s rear so that the answer is actually face and butt. “Animal identification can be tricky!” she concludes, noting that many of the features here function as defenses against attack: “In the animal world, sometimes your butt will save your face and your face just might save your butt!” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gleeful game for budding naturalists. (author’s note) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9781728271170
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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