by Susan K. Mitchell & illustrated by Connie McLennan ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2007
Modeling her text on the folk version of “And the Green Grass Grew All Around” (rather than William Jerome’s lurid ballad of the same name), Mitchell tours a tall kapok tree, pointing out for each cumulative verse a cat, a snake, an ant, a frog or other floral or faunal resident of its ecosystem. Sidebar notes identify each subject as a jaguar, an emerald tree boa and so forth, adding a line or two of further detail, and McLennan furnishes lush, colorful, nearly page-filling close ups of each, painted in reasonably exact detail. There’s no musical arrangement—but the author does append a recipe for “Rainforest cookies,” along with a pair of simple matching games. A lighter, less message-driven alternative to Lynne Cherry’s classroom standby, Great Kapok Tree (1990). (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9768823-6-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Sylvan Dell
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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by Julian Lennon with Bart Davis ; illustrated by Smiljana Coh ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 11, 2017
“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so...
A pro bono Twinkie of a book invites readers to fly off in a magic plane to bring clean water to our planet’s oceans, deserts, and brown children.
Following a confusingly phrased suggestion beneath a soft-focus world map to “touch the Earth. Now touch where you live,” a shake of the volume transforms it into a plane with eyes and feathered wings that flies with the press of a flat, gray “button” painted onto the page. Pressing like buttons along the journey releases a gush of fresh water from the ground—and later, illogically, provides a filtration device that changes water “from yucky to clean”—for thirsty groups of smiling, brown-skinned people. At other stops, a tap on the button will “help irrigate the desert,” and touching floating bottles and other debris in the ocean supposedly makes it all disappear so the fish can return. The 20 children Coh places on a globe toward the end are varied of skin tone, but three of the four young saviors she plants in the flier’s cockpit as audience stand-ins are white. The closing poem isn’t so openly parochial, though it seldom rises above vague feel-good sentiments: “Love the Earth, the moon and sun. / All the children can be one.”
“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so easy to clean the place up and give everyone a drink? (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2083-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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More In The Series
by Julian Lennon & Bart Davis ; illustrated by Smiljana Coh
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BOOK REVIEW
by Julian Lennon & Bart Davis ; illustrated by Smiljana Coh
by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023
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
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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali
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