Never leaves the launchpad.
A photo gallery of Martian landforms and surface features, taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s powerful HiRISE camera.
A failure in both concept and execution, this set of big, square close-ups not only renders HiRISE’s extraordinarily high-resolution shots as, too often, murky blurs, but pairs them to passages of commentary that don’t consistently mention essentials like scale and location—or even seem to be describing what’s on display. Slade offers just a small wedge of what she vaguely dubs a “colossal crater,” for instance, while leaving viewers to search for invisible “channels in the ice” carved among unexplained hillocks at the Martian south pole and wondering what the dark, brushlike formations that seem to be sticking up from “northern sandy dunes” even are. She just swoons over the planet’s “gorgeous rocky layers” and “lovely linear ridges” while building up to a rhapsodic finale (“completely breathtaking!… / Mars is more amazing than anyone ever imagined!”) in immense type. Capped by a closing timeline that asks readers to believe that Mars was “first discovered” in the 1600s, this outing offers neither the information nor the inspiration of similar photo essays like Seymour Simon’s Mars (1987) and Elizabeth Rusch’s Mighty Mars Rovers (2012).
Never leaves the launchpad. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68263-188-1
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Peachtree
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide.
Barr and Williams present 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, from the Big Bang to the International Space Station and, possibly soon, flights beyond.
The co-authors write with the same enthusiasm and energy they showed in telling The Story of Life (2015) but with less regard for accuracy or internal logic. Following an inherently paradoxical opening claim that “Before the Big Bang there was….[n]o time,” they go on with a sweeping survey of the cosmos. It offers a picture of galaxies “sparkling silently” (wrong on both counts) in “bitterly cold” space (likewise wrong: space has no temperature), with incomplete references to the “freezing” atmospheres of our solar system’s other planets (Venus’ 462 C average temperature goes unmentioned) and the “cold, dusty moon” orbiting Earth (cold only on the side away from the sun). Two space-suited young explorers, one light-skinned, one dark, float through painted illustrations that progress from mighty explosions and swirling starscapes to closely packed planets, fleets of early spacecraft, a cloud of satellites, and, finally, space liners ferrying multicultural tour groups to an orbiting hotel, or maybe Mars.
Prospective space tourists should have no trouble finding a more reliable travel guide. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: April 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78603-003-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
A sketchy teaser in search of an audience.
A subatomic narrator describes how helium, a nonrenewable resource, is formed deep underground.
The very simple cartoon style of the illustrations suggests a breezier ride than the scientifically challenging content delivers. With much reliance on explanatory endnotes, Rooney sends her zippy narrator—newly freed from a popped balloon (see Eddie the Electron, 2015)—barreling its way past billions of nitrogen and oxygen atoms to the top of the atmosphere. Eddie describes how uranium and thorium trapped in the newly formed planet’s crust self-destructed to leave helium as a stable byproduct. Billions of tedious years later (“I thought I would die of pair annihilation!”) that helium was extracted for a wide variety of industrial uses. Following mentions of Einstein and how Eddie is mysteriously connected to other atoms “in a way that surpasses space and time,” the popeyed purple particle floats off with a plea to cut down on the party balloons to conserve a rare element. Younger readers may find this last notion easier to latch onto than the previous dose of physics, which is seriously marred both by the vague allusions and by Eddie’s identification as a helium atom rather than the free electron that his portrayals in the art, not to mention his moniker, indicate.
A sketchy teaser in search of an audience. (Informational picture book. 7-9)Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944995-14-0
Page Count: 27
Publisher: Amberjack Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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