Entertaining and modestly informative.
When danger looms, plants get tough.
Silver offers a companion book to Mighty Scared: The Amazing Ways Animals Defend Themselves (2024), introducing readers to plant defenses, the fiercer the better. From roses with sharp prickles (distinguished from thorns in the glossary) to invasive hydrillas, aquatic plants that keep sunlight from the fish beneath, she highlights 13 species whose defenses she finds “cool and courageous.” She covers stinking corpse flowers, exploding pods on touch-me-not balsams, and Venus flytraps, with their snapping jaws. On each spread, she examines a different plant, providing a short expository paragraph describing its defense, a “fierce fact,” and a slangy “Get To Know Me” section narrated by the plant. The actual information is rather skimpy and occasionally inaccurate. Silver doesn’t always note where these plants can be found. She notes that poison ivy vines grow between one and four feet tall, when in fact they can grow up into the tree canopy. And while a diagram refers to the clear liquid in coconuts as milk, it’s in fact water (milk is made from the flesh). McLaughlin’s bright and lively digital illustrations depict all the plants on the opening spread. At times, the artwork personifies both flora and fauna, to readers’ delight. Diverse humans can be seen interacting with the plants. A final spread compares some of these defenses with ways that humans protect themselves, though the examples are a bit of a stretch.
Entertaining and modestly informative. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: March 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781459837973
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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
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