Skips too many basics to offer any advantage, mechanical or otherwise.
An overview of ways that levers have been used throughout history and prehistory.
Instructions for a build-your-own catapult (and an included model) add interest, but this introduction fails on multiple fronts to provide systematic or useful information about the simple machine the device employs. For one thing, while Van Zandt does offer some unusual examples of levers in use (such as a filmmaker’s clapperboard) and properly points out how they often work in tandem with other simple machines like inclined planes and wedges, she never quite gets around to identifying the three types of levers or discussing more than a few of their distinctive capabilities. All three do appear in Breen’s busy historical scenes, colored as bright red bars to stand out, but these illustrations have issues, too. Though the author explains how “catapults” (or, more accurately, onagers) actually worked, the twisted ropes that powered them are either wrongly located, barely glimpsed, or not visible at all in the accompanying illustration of ancient Greek besiegers—some of whom aren’t even aiming their weapons at the stone wall supposedly under attack. The disconnect between text and pictures carries over to a pulley that’s described but not shown, and a lever that’s absent from a schematic view of the airplane engine throttle it supposedly controls. The illustrator does vary the skin tones slightly in the groups of smiling cartoon figures posed next to the scales, steam locomotive, and other technology from various eras.
Skips too many basics to offer any advantage, mechanical or otherwise. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781454961659
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Union Square Kids
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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