Another deceptively simple, soaringly successful flight.
Ballad stanzas celebrate gulls who flourish both near and far from the sea.
Sayre, who has introduced all kinds of animals with clever rhymes and rhythms designed for reading aloud, turns to the gull family. While readers and listeners may know that gulls follow boats and frequent sandy shores, they may be surprised to learn that they fly into deserts, forage in garbage dumps, pursue plowing tractors and feeding whales, and use human-paved roads to open clams shells. After a series of action examples, one stanza to a spread, comes a change of pace, stretching out a reveal over a page turn: “Seagulls nest, / gather sticks. / Spotted eggs, then… // …spotted chicks!” The narrative pauses with a note about the curious way these birds move: “Left wing, left leg, / stretch as one.” With time, the chicks grow, fledge and become adults, circling “from ship to shore” all over again. While Sayre’s books are often illustrated with her own photographs, the choice not to try to photograph the confusing gull family is sensible. From the laughing gulls on the title page to the California gull on the final, dedication page, first-time picture-book illustrator Bogdańska’s digital images are reasonably recognizable (though never identified) and convey something of the range of gull appearances and the wide variety of their habitats. The backmatter adds additional interesting information about gulls’ feeding habits, their varied and varying plumage, and their common name.
Another deceptively simple, soaringly successful flight. (acknowledgments) (Informational picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68437-197-6
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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