A riveting look at an iconic landmark and architectural feat.
A child-centered account of the origins of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
The lighthouse keeper’s children wake to a foghorn’s blast. Pa rushes out the door to see the work begin on the new bridge. The children watch, too. Steel and concrete square off against fog, wind, and surf. But the “impossible” challenge of building the world’s longest suspension bridge (at the time) rallies builders. Dynamite and machines reshape the land. The foreman stops by the lighthouse—based on the real-life Lime Point Lighthouse, where lighthouse keepers and their families lived—for coffee and pancakes. During one visit, the children even get to see the bridge’s blueprints. Construction goes on for days, months, even years as the children take in the sights and sounds. The author carefully recounts each step until opening day on May 27, 1937. The whole family wakes early once more to join the celebration as the completed bridge hums with life and excitement. Making playful use of language, Partridge’s immersive, meticulously detailed second-person narration pairs seamlessly with Heck’s intricate, realistic images for a child’s-eye glimpse of the whole thrilling process. Endpapers beautifully mimic the iconic bridge, with close-ups on the reddish-orange steel. The afterword offers essential historical context, including a note about Mohawk ironworkers who helped build the bridge. The family is light-skinned.
A riveting look at an iconic landmark and architectural feat. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781452135144
Page Count: 60
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
Enticing and eco-friendly.
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)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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