A solid choice for easing insect anxieties and fostering outdoor curiosity.
Buzzeo tackles children’s common anxieties about bees, wasps, and hornets with straightforward information and safety advice.
The book clearly distinguishes among these three types of insects, explaining their different roles—bees as essential pollinators, wasps and hornets as garden and farm pest controllers. The content strikes an appropriate balance for the target audience, offering enough facts to inform without overwhelming. Safety rules are simple and memorable: Stop, be quiet, keep hands still, move away slowly, watch the ground. Instructions for sting treatment are equally clear, reinforced by Cepeda’s effective visual sequence, where three circular vignettes demonstrate the steps: washing with soap and water, applying ice, and using anti-itch cream. The narrative follows a diverse group of children as they move from fear to interest, eventually observing insects up close with “science eyes.” Cepeda’s digital illustrations are friendly and colorful, with compositions that keep focus squarely on the facts and the children’s emotions. Helpful backmatter provides additional specific facts about the bees, wasps, and hornets depicted in the book (“bees have FIVE eyes and FOUR wings,” “all hornets are wasps! But not all wasps are hornets”), extending learning for inquisitive readers.
A solid choice for easing insect anxieties and fostering outdoor curiosity. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: June 2, 2026
ISBN: 9780823459711
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A ribald and uproarious warning to those unschooled in fishy goings-on.
Sharpson offers so-fish-ticated readers a heads up about the true terror of the seas.
The title says it all. Our unseen narrator is just fine with other animals: mammals. Reptiles. Even birds. But fish? Don’t trust them! First off, the rules always seem to change with fish. Some live in fresh water; some reside in salt water. Some have gills, while others have lungs. You can never see what they’re up to, since they hang out underwater, and they’re always eating those poor, innocent crabs. Soon, the narrator introduces readers to Jeff, a vacant-eyed yellow fish—but don’t be fooled! Jeff’s “the craftiest fish of all.” All fish are, apparently, hellbent on world domination, the narrator warns. “DON’T TRUST FISH!” Finally, at the tail end, we get a sly glimpse of our unreliable narrator. Readers needn’t be ichthyologists to appreciate Sharpson’s meticulous comic timing. (“Ships always sink at sea. They never sink on land. Isn’t that strange?”) His delightful text, filled to the brim with jokes that read aloud brilliantly, pairs perfectly with Santat’s art, which shifts between extreme realism and goofy hilarity. He also fills the book with his own clever gags (such as an image of Gilligan’s Island’s S.S. Minnow going down and a bottle of sauce labeled “Surly Chik’n Srir’racha’r”).
A ribald and uproarious warning to those unschooled in fishy goings-on. (Picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593616673
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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