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MARS IS by Suzanne Slade

MARS IS

Stark Slopes, Silvery Snow, and Startling Surprises

by Suzanne Slade

Pub Date: April 1st, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68263-188-1
Publisher: Peachtree

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)