Solid gold.
An evil chemist’s oddly blocky fortress serves as the setting for a dream quest through the elements.
Well-prepared but afflicted with severe test anxiety, Mel falls asleep the night before a chemistry exam and finds herself in the Land of the Elements, helping blobby Hydrogen recover a book of spells, er, chemistry experiments snatched by the evil Elemancer. Traveling systematically through the Periodic Fortress from Alkali Metals to Noble Gases, she’s forced to draw on her knowledge of molecular processes and each group’s common characteristics to get past a series of elemental monsters—and, climactically, to face her fears as the sneering nemesis assaults her with pop-quiz questions: “How many elements are there?” “Is an element’s atomic number the same as its weight?” “What do you call it when matter changes from a solid to a gas?” Along with rooting for the young savant, readers will have challenges of their own to face, as Chad loads the script and art with information on atoms and atomic numbers, compounds versus mixtures, ionic and covalent bonding, isotopes, allotropes, radioactivity, the periodic table’s origins and organization, and how select elements of the 118 identified so far have been put to use. Mel, who like her comforting mom (the only other human figure) presents as Black, wakes up ready to tackle the ultimate test with new, and just possibly contagious, confidence in her preparation.
Solid gold. (table of elements, metric conversion chart, glossary, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-15)Pub Date: March 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781250767615
Page Count: 128
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
A solid, soaring survey.
To unpack the equation “engineering = science + art,” a quartet of pontists survey and explain bridge design.
Taking a worldwide tour that goes from a fallen log across a stream in Kenya’s Aberdare National Park to the 164.8-kilometer-long Danyang-Kunshan Grand Bridge, the four guides point out salient features of dozens of bridges ancient and modern while pausing to explain loads and forces, analyze materials, give the nod to historical disasters like the Tay Bridge collapse (inviting young experimenters to test model bridges of their own), and, importantly, marvel at the beauty as well as the utility of well-designed, well-placed bridges. The cast is a diverse lot—ranging from Trudy, a light-skinned retired science teacher who zooms through the chapter on truss bridges on a tricycle, to Black-presenting fifth grader Spence, who hangs with suspension bridges—and their enthusiasm is so contagious that by the end readers willing to linger over Zettwoch’s exactly drawn structures will not only view bridges in their own locales with fresh appreciation, but have no trouble distinguishing a corbel arch from a Warren pony truss.
A solid, soaring survey. (glossary, bibliography) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-14)Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-21690-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Expansive, engaging, and lucid.
A graphic tour of ways we measure and think about time, squired by (who else?) Albert Einstein.
Using non-mathematical language to explain the mind-bending ins and outs of time to young audiences constitutes a challenge, even with help from the world’s greatest scientist—a challenge that Brown meets with aplomb. He starts out with such easy stuff as the history of timepieces, from the 364 steps of the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá to John Harrison’s nautical clock and why we divide a day into 12 parts. (It has to do with knuckles, specifically ancient Egyptian ones.) Things get more complicated when Einstein describes how he revolutionized Newton’s and others’ notion that time moves at its own invariable speed with the counter-notion that because light has constant speed, the pace of time has to change, depending on how fast things go relative to one another. “Patience,” he counsels through his brushy mustache, marshalling such classic examples as a moving train with a stationary observer. “It will all make sense.” Thanks to Brown’s cogent explanations, it will, in time…and with some digging into the substantial appended bibliography. Along with brilliantly challenging readers to realize just how much remains to be learned about how our universe ticks, the author leaves them with further puzzlers to ponder, such as whether time comes with a beginning and an end. Humans are rare in the loose, spare cartoon art.
Expansive, engaging, and lucid. (timeline, biographical note) (Graphic nonfiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9781419773310
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Abrams Fanfare
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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