A modest, but engaging work provides children with tales of bees and the water cycle using bright colors and simple rhyming...
This first installment in a picture book series introduces scientific concepts through the dreams of a chemistry-loving little girl.
Preschoolers and elementary school-age children are the target audience for this cheery volume, crafted around basic scientific principles, written by Boykin (The Atom: What Am I Really?, 2016), a member of the American Chemical Society’s Coaching Program. She works in the field of polymer chemistry and chemical engineering and also teaches her own series of children’s chemistry classes. The work, using a simple four-line rhyme pattern, comprises two short chapters book-ended by a “prologue” and “epilogue.” In the first chapter, the cautionary tale of “The Lazy Bee” offers an uncomplicated narrative explaining that bees collect nectar to make honey and fulfill different jobs within the hive. The chapter’s final stanza encourages kids to think of learning STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math—as a pathway to discovery. “The Sunburn Snowman” takes children through the water cycle, from freeze to thaw to water vapor and rain, voiced by a friendly snowman with a notably sunny attitude about the process: “We have changed from solid to liquid / And then a liquid to a gas, / Until we drift down as new snowflakes / To play again with you at last.” The book begins and ends with a girl going to sleep and dreaming of “a wonderland / Of how and what things do,” reinforcing in words and in the use of a female character the idea that studying science, math, and chemistry is a rewarding pursuit for all children, not an intimidating one. The text is set within and underneath French’s colorful illustrations framed with “dream” clouds. While fairly standard in style, these images deliver such pleasant touches as a curling leaf-turned-lounge chair, and water droplets with snowman faces under jaunty caps. Boykin’s next installment in the series, Chemistry In My Dreams, Book 2: Man-Made Processes, is due out in 2017.
A modest, but engaging work provides children with tales of bees and the water cycle using bright colors and simple rhyming text.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: The Body Press/Perigee
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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