Cheeky fun, with bits of solid matter.
A breezy disquisition on a fundamental topic.
Manzano opens with a broad survey of human bottoms (“Every butt has its own personality. Some might be quite shy, while others are quite bold”). She goes on to probe the overall evolution of anuses from the Cambrian period on, as well as the glorious variety of colors, shapes, and functions enjoyed by the posteriors of modern creatures of land and sea. Giraffes place their necks on their “speckled butts” before going to sleep, while the Papilio xuthus butterfly has photoreceptors on its butt. Most memorably, she explains how animal butts send and receive messages using each of the five senses—or four, anyway: “Actually, you know what? Let’s skip taste. Ick!” Urberuaga has chosen to illustrate these easily grasped scientific observations (translated from Spanish by Ross) in a comical way, with cartoon figures of humans in diverse arrays of skin hue and body type, bare or sporting loudly decorated underwear, alternating with either detached butts endowed with faces and stick limbs or fanny-flashing wildlife from mandrills and manatees to dogs and sea slugs. “No two butts are alike,” Manzano concludes, but they all “love to dance.” Readers will have no trouble getting…behind that.
Cheeky fun, with bits of solid matter. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9788419607218
Page Count: 48
Publisher: NubeOcho
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Norma Dixon’s Lowdown on Earthworms (2005) digs deeper into the subject, but this lays fertile groundwork for budding...
Beginning readers who tunnel through this upbeat first introduction will “dig” them too.
After an opening look at several kinds of worm (including the candy sort), McCloskey drills down to the nitty-gritty on earthworms. He describes how they help soil with their digging and “poop” (“EEW!”) and presents full-body inside and outside views with labeled parts. He also answers in the worms’ collective voice such questions as “Why do you come out after the rain?” and “How big is the biggest worm in the world?” that are posed by a multiethnic cast of intent young investigators in the cartoon illustrations. A persistent but frustrated bluebird’s “Yum, yum!!” and rejected invitations to lunch offer indirect references to worms as food sources, and reproductive details are likewise limited to oblique notes that worms have big families “born from cocoons.” Single scenes mingle with short sequences of panels in pictures that are drawn on brown paper bags for an appropriately earthy look.
Norma Dixon’s Lowdown on Earthworms (2005) digs deeper into the subject, but this lays fertile groundwork for budding naturalists. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-935179-80-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap.
Budding naturalists who dug We Dig Worms! (2015) will, well, coo over this similarly enlightening accolade.
A curmudgeonly park visitor’s “They’re RATS with wings!” sparks spirited rejoinders from a racially diverse flock of children wearing full-body bird outfits, who swoop down to deliver a mess of pigeon facts. Along with being related to the dodo, “rock doves” fly faster than a car, mate for life, have been crossbred into all sorts of “fancies,” inspired Pablo Picasso to name his daughter “Paloma” in their honor, can be eaten (“Tastes like chicken”), and, like penguins and flamingos, create “pigeon milk” in their crops for their hatchlings. Painted on light blue art paper—“the kind,” writes McCloskey in his afterword, “used by Picasso”—expertly depicted pigeons of diverse breeds common and fancy strut their stuff, with views of the children and other wild creatures, plus occasional helpful labels, interspersed. In the chastened parkgoer’s eyes, as in those of the newly independent readers to whom this is aimed, the often maligned birds are “wonderful.” Cue a fresh set of costumed children on the final page, gearing up to set him straight on squirrels.
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap. (Graphic informational early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935179-93-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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