A celebration of an early environmental success.
Nuisance beavers find a new home.
In 1948, in fast-growing McCall, Idaho, beavers were looked at as pests. Game warden Elmo Heter tried to remove them, but it was hard to keep semi-aquatic animals happy on a long horseback journey. He came up with an innovative solution: flying them into the mountains and dropping them by parachute into Idaho’s backcountry. (In the aftermath of World War II, surplus parachutes were readily available.) Elmo designed a box that would open when it landed and experimented with a test beaver he named Geronimo. (Readers probably won’t know that this was what World War II airmen shouted as they parachuted out of planes.) Once he was certain the boxes would work, he captured 75 more beavers and had them all flown and dropped into a mountain wilderness where beavers had been wiped out years earlier. A later survey revealed that the beavers had done just what Elmo had intended: They dammed streams and made a wetland. Tracy’s storytelling is succinct, straightforward, and appropriate for her young audience. She emphasizes the advantages of Elmo’s excellent idea, both for the beavers and for the wilderness; backmatter addresses later controversies about wildlife relocation and newer methods. Uribe’s muted digital artwork portrays the details of Elmo's planning, the beauty of the landscape, and some very appealing beavers. These spreads would show well at storytime.
A celebration of an early environmental success. (author’s note, selected sources) (Informational picture book. 4-8)Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593647523
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Random House Studio
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2024
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
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
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