Informative and beautiful.
A community helps amphibians cross nighttime roads.
In spring, when frost thaws and rain arrives, amphibians such as spring peepers and salamanders begin their journey from woods to the vernal pools where they’ll spawn. That perilous journey involves crossing roads as vehicles whoosh past. Enter the Amphibian Migration Team—volunteers who stand at these crossings at night to monitor traffic and help “our tiny friends” to safely cross “a wet road on a wet night in spring.” As citizen scientists, the volunteers also count survivors and casualties. Percival chronicles this process in unadorned prose through the eyes of one multiracial family, who not only volunteer, but also advocate for the creation of a wildlife tunnel to allow the creatures safe passage beneath the road. The Black-presenting child who narrates emerges as a hero, asking questions packed with answers. “Do they hear the other frogs singing and think, Tonight is the night! It’s time to go down to the pool to lay our jelly eggs safely in the water!” The explanatory part of the story—the making of a toad tunnel, from design to budget to town council approval—offers readers a road map. At times the narration slips into more telling than showing, but the illustrations, rendered digitally but in the style of woodcut prints, are spectacular. Spreads saturated with nighttime purples, browns, and yellows riven with beams from headlamps fill the page, while charming, illustrated bubbles pop up alongside the child’s head.
Informative and beautiful. (more information on amphibians and wildlife-crossing structures, safety guidelines, guidance on being a community scientist, glossary, “can you find” visual search game) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781797214566
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
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)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A gleeful game for budding naturalists.
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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