A gentle reminder that we haven’t been good to our natural home, but it’s not too late to make amends.
A rhymed appeal to free the many rivers and streams buried beneath city streets.
Paired with Debbink’s earnest verse (“They captured the currents, / and green turned to gray / as the rivers’ bright habitats faded away”), Wong’s carefully detailed scenes depict unspoiled waterways that attract and are in time dominated, polluted, and finally covered by growing cities. However, in the names of flood control and habitat renewal, these bodies of water have come at last to be “daylighted” once again. Rather than name specific rivers that have been covered or restored, the author opts for an emotional plea to consider the beauty and benefits open rivers bring to urban ecosystems in general: “So think about this when you walk down the street: / There could be a river right under your feet. / Then imagine the wonders, the world that could be; / you will see it yourself, if the rivers run free.” Two light-skinned children running obliviously down a sidewalk over a covered culvert on the first page are left at the end looking thoughtful and visualizing an idyllic riverine greenway running through their neighborhood. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
A gentle reminder that we haven’t been good to our natural home, but it’s not too late to make amends. (afterword) (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781534112780
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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