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LIGHT SPEAKS

Name: LIGHT SPEAKS
Author: Christine Layton
ISBN: 9780884489245

by Christine Layton ; illustrated by Luciana Navarro Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 4, 2023

Though the text is less than illuminating, the gorgeous visuals help shed light on the topic.

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An homage to light.

This sparklingly illustrated picture book consists of spare, poetic verse exploring the properties of light; however, it’s often too impenetrable for easy understanding (“light laughs in code, / signals in signs…”). Luckily, the book concludes with two pages of scientific context for some of the more cryptic phrases. For instance, Layton explains that the statement “Light tells the space between stars. / It echoes off planets and moons” means that we can see planets and moons—which do not generate their own light—in the night sky because light reflects off them from stars. While the idea of using poetry to celebrate light is an intriguing one, the abstruse verse and in-depth scientific explanations seem geared toward an older audience than the illustrations. The images are the stars of the show, making rich use of color to convey the idea of a shimmering universe. They offer some grounding to the esoteric narrative and present their own secondary storyline in which brown-skinned children (including one wheelchair user) observe light all around them as they shine flashlights at each other, cower from lightning during a storm, and gleefully capture fireflies. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Though the text is less than illuminating, the gorgeous visuals help shed light on the topic. (Informational picture book. 5-8)

Pub Date: April 4, 2023

ISBN: 9780884489245

Page Count: 32

Publisher: Tilbury House

Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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BUTT OR FACE?

by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

A gleeful game for budding naturalists.

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

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by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

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WE MOVE THE WORLD
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

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A PLACE FOR RAIN

by Michelle Schaub ; illustrated by Blanca Gómez ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024

Enticing and eco-friendly.

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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)