Obliquely told and unevenly illustrated, this Slinky story’s just OK.
Ford portrays the back story of the Slinky, the coiled steel toy that debuted in 1945 and still sells today.
Richard James, a white naval engineer at a Philadelphia shipyard, discovers that a torsion spring, aided by gravity, can “walk” from an incline. James and his wife, Betty, persevere to create and market the toy. Securing a $500 bank loan to produce 400 units, Richard demonstrates the toy at Gimbels during the holiday season, selling all 400 Slinkys in 90 minutes. Later, he designs machinery that speeds fabrication. Ford’s reductive narrative portrays the couple as an enterprising unit: as production shifts to a factory, it “took the teamwork of a dreamer and a planner to turn an ordinary spring… / into a truly marvelous thing!” Betty’s role in resurrecting the company from near bankruptcy in 1960, after Richard “left to do missionary work in Bolivia,” is relegated to a note. Ford omits the couple’s divorce, six kids, why the company foundered, and that Betty ran it successfully until its 1998 sale. Busy illustrations combine digitally created cutouts with found objects, photographed in dioramas. While some of the cartoonish figures are depicted as people of color, most are white, tinted various pinks. Found objects seem haphazardly chosen and integrated compared to the superior constructions of Melissa Sweet.
Obliquely told and unevenly illustrated, this Slinky story’s just OK. (bibliography) (Picture book/biography. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5065-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the...
Rhymed couplets convey the story of a girl who likes to build things but is shy about it. Neither the poetry nor Rosie’s projects always work well.
Rosie picks up trash and oddments where she finds them, stashing them in her attic room to work on at night. Once, she made a hat for her favorite zookeeper uncle to keep pythons away, and he laughed so hard that she never made anything publicly again. But when her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit and reminds Rosie of her own past building airplanes, she expresses her regret that she still has not had the chance to fly. Great-great-aunt Rose is visibly modeled on Rosie the Riveter, the iconic, red-bandanna–wearing poster woman from World War II. Rosie decides to build a flying machine and does so (it’s a heli-o-cheese-copter), but it fails. She’s just about to swear off making stuff forever when Aunt Rose congratulates her on her failure; now she can go on to try again. Rosie wears her hair swooped over one eye (just like great-great-aunt Rose), and other figures have exaggerated hairdos, tiny feet and elongated or greatly rounded bodies. The detritus of Rosie’s collections is fascinating, from broken dolls and stuffed animals to nails, tools, pencils, old lamps and possibly an erector set. And cheddar-cheese spray.
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the right place. (historical note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0845-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd.
This British import is an imaginatively constructed sequence of images that show a white boy examining a city pavement, clearly in London, and the sights he would see if he were able to travel down to the Earth’s core and then back again to the surface.
The geologic layers are depicted in 10 vertical spreads that require a 90-degree turn to be read and include endpapers, which open out, concertina fashion, to show the interior of the Earth to its core. Beneath the urban setting are drains, pipes, and artifacts of urban infrastructure. Below that, archaeological relics are revealed. An Underground train speeds by, and below it, a stalactite-encrusted cave yawns. Deep below the Earth’s crust, magma, the Earth’s mantle, and the inner core are shown. Turn the page to start going up again, back through the mantle to the crust, where precious minerals are revealed, then fossils, tree roots, and animal burrows, ending with the same boy in the English countryside. The painted, stenciled, and collaged illustrations are full-bleed, and the tones graduate pleasantly from light colors at the surface of the Earth to rich pinks, yellows, and oranges as readers near the Earth’s core. The text is informative, if lacking in poetry, including such nuggets as “earthworms are expert recyclers, eating dead plants in the soil.”
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68297-136-9
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Words & Pictures
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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