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TASTY TREATS

EASY COOKING FOR CHILDREN

A lovely gift idea for children just old enough to chop and stir.

Basic recipes and useful kitchen tips fill this children’s cookbook.

With one spread per recipe and additional spreads to introduce kitchen utensils, tips on food storage, and encouragement for picnics and parties, this German import features fresh ingredients for meals, snacks, and beverages children (and their grown-ups) will enjoy repeatedly, with multiple variations suggested for each basic recipe. Recipes include pancakes with fruit, French toast, rainbow salad, easy ice cream (made of frozen fruit), fried rice, campfire bread, and more. Use whatever you have, and take advantage of leftovers, with recipes for veggie quesadillas and pizza with dough from scratch. Scoop out the flesh of a melon to use the shell as your bowl for a juicy fruit salad. Ginger-honey lemonade and berry mocktail recipes look especially tantalizing. The children occasionally featured in the illustrations are racially diverse. The ingredients are clearly illustrated for ease of reference at a glance, and the instructions are printed in a fairly large font with large numbers enumerating the steps and the need for adult help signaled when appropriate. Measurements are given in metric units, with English volume and weights in parentheses. Watercolor illustrations and well-chosen typeface make this an attractive, tastefully designed book for browsing and daydreaming as well as for getting busy in the kitchen.

A lovely gift idea for children just old enough to chop and stir. (Nonfiction. 5-10)

Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2020

ISBN: 978-3-89955-148-8

Page Count: 96

Publisher: Little Gestalten

Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020

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THE LITTLE BOOK OF JOY

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.

From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.

Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022

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DO NOT LICK THIS BOOK

Science at its best: informative and gross.

Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”

Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.

Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)

Pub Date: June 5, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook

Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018

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