These fascinating creatures will entrance little readers and their grown-ups.
A walrus’s life is filled with ice and ocean and sound.
Lilting rhyming verse follows a walrus’s actions in his icy home. He plays on an ice floe, dives deep into the frigid water, seeks and finds food, and playfully shoos away a pesky puffin. Lawler vividly describes the walrus as he “waddles” and “lumbers” on the ice and twirls and whirls in the sea, keeping warm thanks to his massive layers of fat. He joins a huge pack of his cronies to snuggle and nuzzle. All is not always peaceful and calm; he engages in a mighty, crashing, tusk-bashing fight with another walrus. Fight over, he lets out with a variety of delightfully spelled calls and songs that echo throughout the area and will encourage young readers to try echoing those sounds themselves. Lawler keeps the tone light and fun while imparting a great deal of information about a walrus’s physicality, habitats, and food sources. No explanation is given within the text for the fight or the calls, or for the appearance of babies born in the spring, but answers and additional information on all things walrus are provided in an afterword. Ering’s brilliant, luminous, lifelike paintings capture their subject close-up and in great detail, accurately depicting his every movement and mood and perfectly capturing the setting in icy whites and deep-sea blues and greens under a purple-gray sky.
These fascinating creatures will entrance little readers and their grown-ups. (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0755-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute.
Readers bid farewell to a beloved canine character.
Momo is—or was—an adorable and very photogenic border collie owned by author Knapp. The many readers who loved him in the previous half-dozen books are in for a shock with this one. “Momo had died” is the stark reality—and there are no photographs of him here. Instead, Momo has been replaced by a flat cartoonish pastiche with strange, staring round white eyes, inserted into some of Knapp’s photography (which remains appealing, insofar as it can be discerned under the mixed media). Previous books contained few or no words. Unfortunately, virtuosity behind a lens does not guarantee mastery of verse. The art here is accompanied by words that sometimes rhyme but never find a workable or predictable rhythm (“We’d fetch and we’d catch, / we’d run and we’d jump. Every day we found new / games to play”). It’s a pity, because the subject—a pet’s death—is an important one to address with children. Of course, Momo isn’t gone; he can still be found “everywhere” in memories. But alas, he can be found here only in the crude depictions of the darling dog so well known from the earlier books.
A well-meaning but lackluster tribute. (Picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781683693864
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Another playful imagination-stretcher.
Markle invites children to picture themselves living in the homes of 11 wild animals.
As in previous entries in the series, McWilliam’s illustrations of a diverse cast of young people fancifully imitating wild creatures are paired with close-up photos of each animal in a like natural setting. The left side of one spread includes a photo of a black bear nestling in a cozy winter den, while the right side features an image of a human one cuddled up with a bear. On another spread, opposite a photo of honeybees tending to newly hatched offspring, a human “larva” lounges at ease in a honeycomb cell, game controller in hand, as insect attendants dish up goodies. A child with an eye patch reclines on an orb weaver spider’s web, while another wearing a head scarf constructs a castle in a subterranean chamber with help from mound-building termites. Markle adds simple remarks about each type of den, nest, or burrow and basic facts about its typical residents, then closes with a reassuring reminder to readers that they don’t have to live as animals do, because they will “always live where people live.” A select gallery of traditional homes, from igloo and yurt to mudhif, follows a final view of the young cast waving from a variety of differently styled windows.
Another playful imagination-stretcher. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781339049052
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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