A terrific introduction to the ups and downs of measurement as well as relative scale.
Based on current fossil evidence, as tall as 10 velociraptors—or one giraffe.
Limentani doesn’t stop with height, though, and, as in her How Much Does a Ladybug Weigh? (2016) and How Long Is a Whale? (2017), profiles her subject in full using singularly vivid comparisons. T. Rex’s eyes were “as big as baseballs,” its teeth the size of bananas, its body and tail together as long as “6 lions.” In bold-lined, digitally colored linocut and collatype prints, she vividly demonstrates her comparisons. At one point she lines up sports balls of different sorts beneath a toothy head (playfully setting a baseball in the socket of a skeletal one on the opposite page to show placement), and at another she balances a T. Rex on one end of a teeter-totter with three 5,500-pound modern hippos on the other. She properly qualifies less-verifiable claims—T. Rex “might have been” scaly or feathered, “could have run as fast as an elephant or a meerkat”—but bases her physical estimates on specific fossils dubbed “Thomas,” “Stan,” and “Sue” and backs them up with an appended set of size ranges in feet and inches (no metric measurements are given).
A terrific introduction to the ups and downs of measurement as well as relative scale. (Informational picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9107-1657-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Boxer Books
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bruce Goldstone’s Awesome Autumn (2012) is still the gold standard.
Rotner follows Hello Spring (2017) with this salute to the fall season.
Name a change seen in northern climes in fall, and Rotner likely covers it here, from plants, trees, and animals to the food we harvest: seeds are spread, the days grow shorter and cooler, the leaves change and fall (and are raked up and jumped in), some animals migrate, and many families celebrate Halloween and Thanksgiving. As in the previous book, the photographs (presented in a variety of sizes and layouts, all clean) are the stars here, displaying both the myriad changes of the season and a multicultural array of children enjoying the outdoors in fall. These are set against white backgrounds that make the reddish-orange print pop. The text itself uses short sentences and some solid vocabulary (though “deep sleep” is used instead of “hibernate”) to teach readers the markers of autumn, though in the quest for simplicity, Rotner sacrifices some truth. In several cases, the addition of just a few words would have made the following oversimplified statements reflect reality: “Birds grow more feathers”; “Cranberries float and turn red.” Also, Rotner includes the statement “Bees store extra honey in their hives” on a page about animals going into deep sleep, implying that honeybees hibernate, which is false.
Bruce Goldstone’s Awesome Autumn (2012) is still the gold standard. (Informational picture book. 4-7)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3869-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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