An also-ran bearing a respectable informational payload but inching along a well-covered track.
After a year of digging, sifting, baking, sweeping, and photographing the surface of Mars, it’s party time.
Unlike Sara Schonfeld’s effervescent Birthday on Mars!, illustrated by Andrew J. Ross (2019), this introduction to the durable Curiosity (still ticking over six years after its original mission’s conclusion) is as dry overall as the red planet itself. “Ack! Spooked by my own shadow. That happens when you’re the ONLY ONE on a planet,” reads Curiosity’s narration, set in a typeface that looks like a digital readout. Supplemental text explains, “Shadows are made on Mars in the same way they are formed on Earth, by an object blocking the light. In this case, the rover is blocking sunlight.” In strained efforts to inject some color into Gray’s drab descriptions of Curiosity’s gear, activities, and surroundings, Magoon tops the angularly drawn rover’s “ChemCam” with a perky party hat partway through, litters the dimly lit Martian landscape with printed invitations, and, confusingly, rolls in a nonexistent second rover bearing party balloons to get the festivities underway. Readers will likely find the closing author’s note, which includes a dramatic account of the rover’s landing, notes on each of its six specialized cameras, and several color photos, more memorable than the stolid preceding narrative.
An also-ran bearing a respectable informational payload but inching along a well-covered track. (bibliography) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-64648-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so...
A pro bono Twinkie of a book invites readers to fly off in a magic plane to bring clean water to our planet’s oceans, deserts, and brown children.
Following a confusingly phrased suggestion beneath a soft-focus world map to “touch the Earth. Now touch where you live,” a shake of the volume transforms it into a plane with eyes and feathered wings that flies with the press of a flat, gray “button” painted onto the page. Pressing like buttons along the journey releases a gush of fresh water from the ground—and later, illogically, provides a filtration device that changes water “from yucky to clean”—for thirsty groups of smiling, brown-skinned people. At other stops, a tap on the button will “help irrigate the desert,” and touching floating bottles and other debris in the ocean supposedly makes it all disappear so the fish can return. The 20 children Coh places on a globe toward the end are varied of skin tone, but three of the four young saviors she plants in the flier’s cockpit as audience stand-ins are white. The closing poem isn’t so openly parochial, though it seldom rises above vague feel-good sentiments: “Love the Earth, the moon and sun. / All the children can be one.”
“It’s time to head back home,” the narrator concludes. “You’ve touched the Earth in so many ways.” Who knew it would be so easy to clean the place up and give everyone a drink? (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-2083-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Hurray for the underdog.
Heart (-shaped surface feature) literally broken by its demotion from planet status, Pluto glumly conducts readers on a tour of the solar system.
You’d be bummed, too. Angrily rejecting the suggestions of “mean scientists” from Earth that “ice dwarf” or “plutoid” might serve as well (“Would you like to be called humanoid?”), Pluto drifts out of the Kuiper Belt to lead readers past the so-called “real” planets in succession. All sport faces with googly eyes in Keller’s bright illustrations, and distinct personalities, too—but also actual physical characteristics (“Neptune is pretty icy. And gassy. I’m not being mean, he just is”) that are supplemented by pages of “fun facts” at the end. Having fended off Saturn’s flirtation, endured Jupiter’s stormy reception (“Keep OFF THE GAS!”) and relentless mockery from the asteroids, and given Earth the cold shoulder, Pluto at last takes the sympathetic suggestion of Venus and Mercury to talk to the Sun. “She’s pretty bright.” A (what else?) warm welcome, plus our local star’s comforting reminders that every celestial body is unique (though “people talk about Uranus for reasons I don’t really want to get into”), and anyway, scientists are still arguing the matter because that’s what “science” is all about, mend Pluto’s heart at last: “Whatever I’m called, I’ll always be PLUTO!”
Hurray for the underdog. (afterword) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1453-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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