Likely to have trouble finding an audience.
Rhymed introductions to common fruits and vegetables, with recipes that use them.
Widdowson’s lively scenes of smiling, racially diverse people cultivating or shopping for brightly colored foodstuffs create a positive mood for this international survey, but the written portions are lacking. Not only does Jorden dangerously assert that “All berries are yummy AND good for your brain” and, nonsensically, that “Corn has ‘ears’ but it can’t talk,” her unrhymed side notes include hard-to-answer questions like “How many different kinds [of apples] have you tried?” (no examples are provided) as well as a simplistic translation of the scientific name for pineapple and an equally questionable claim that frozen bananas are a popular treat in the United States. Of the seven recipes at the end, which are drawn from a 2022 cookbook for adults, an amusing “Make Do Ratatou(ille)” includes “4 medium bruised tomatoes,” “2 medium red onions on their last legs,” and “2 teaspoons fresh rosemary that has been in your refrigerator far too long” but, like the others, comes with a long list of ingredients and isn’t particularly child appropriate. The spread of exhortations to develop sustainable eating habits sandwiched between the two sections is too generalized to be convincing. Laura Mucha, Ed Smith, and Harriet Lynas’ Welcome to Our Table (2023) makes a more nourishing choice for cluing children in to where their food comes from. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Likely to have trouble finding an audience. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781641709910
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Familius
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Bright and lively—but saddled with misses both near and wide.
The creators of The Great Big Body Book (2016) pay tribute to the organ “in charge of every single thing our bodies can do.” (Though look what’s telling them that.)
That’s just the first of several simplistic or downright wrong claims in an otherwise perceptive and lighthearted overview that covers the brain’s growth and general structure, its role in perception as well as cognition and communication, emotions, learning and memory (including amnesia and Alzheimer’s), developmental differences, sleep, and dreams—all in nontechnical language. Along with throwing out tantalizing statements like the brain “changes again a lot during the teenage years” without elaboration and that dreaming may help in “getting rid of things we don’t need,” Hoffman misses opportunities to, for instance, mention more than the traditional five senses. She also muddles her own more accurate account of how the nervous system works with a line about how neurons “head back to your brain” with sensory messages, and, in what comes off as a weak attempt to reassure readers anxious about being replaced by robots, abruptly switches tracks to close with dismissive views about the current state of artificial intelligence. Asquith mixes a satisfyingly inclusive crowd of expressive human figures in active poses with bright cartoon diagrams and anatomical views…but she includes a long-debunked “map” of where taste buds are located on the tongue that doesn’t include “umami” in the labeling.
Bright and lively—but saddled with misses both near and wide. (glossary) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7112-4154-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Frances Lincoln
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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