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THERE'S A SKELETON INSIDE YOU!

Name: THERE'S A SKELETON INSIDE YOU!
Author: Idan Ben-Barak
ISBN: 978-1-250-17537-3

by Idan Ben-Barak ; illustrated by Julian Frost ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2020

A clever presentation of some basic anatomy by a duo with talented hands indeed.

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Space travelers discover the utility of hands and what’s inside them: bones, muscles, and nerves.

The Australian creative team who introduced readers to microbes in Do Not Lick This Book (2017) returns with a similarly metafictive introduction to our structural insides. Zooming through space to a friend’s birthday party, Quog and Oort accidentally crash their ship on Earth. Breaking the fourth wall, the narrator asks readers to help these aliens by turning the page to open their space ship. Quog, a green blob, is impressed by this demonstration of the utility of hands and immediately grows some but finds she also needs bones, muscles, and nerves. Readers are given plenty of opportunities to interact with the story: putting their hands on the pages so that Oort, a pink, three-eyed gas cloud, can see inside; lifting the book; and even turning a page with their eyes closed. There’s a departing high-five after the ETs successfully fix their vessel, then a grand, wordless spread shows what hands and arms are really good for: hugs. A final tongue-in-cheek spread offers instructions for growing your own extra hands. The uncluttered, flat design of the playful illustrations has the air of animation and nicely contrasts with three-dimensional views of bones, muscles and ligaments, and nerves set on a surprisingly pink background. (This book was reviewed digitally with 10-by-16-inch double-page spreads viewed at 87.5% of actual size.)

A clever presentation of some basic anatomy by a duo with talented hands indeed. (Informational picture book. 4-8)

Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-17537-3

Page Count: 40

Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020

Categories:

CHILDREN'S CONCEPTS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
WE GO WAY BACK
by Idan Ben-Barak ; illustrated by Philip Bunting

- BOOK REVIEW
DO NOT LICK THIS BOOK
by Idan Ben-Barak ; illustrated by Julian Frost with photographed by Linnea Rundgren

- PERSPECTIVES
Fall Preview: Informational Picture Books

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BUTT OR FACE?

by Kari Lavelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 2023

A gleeful game for budding naturalists.

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S ANIMALS | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
ODE TO GRAPEFRUIT
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Bryan Collier

- BOOK REVIEW
WE MOVE THE WORLD
by Kari Lavelle ; illustrated by Nabi H. Ali

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ANIMAL ARCHITECTS

From the Amazing Animals series

by Amy Cherrix ; illustrated by Chris Sasaki ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 2021

An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.

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A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.

Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)

An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)