This sweet story may very well plant seeds of inspiration in readers’ minds.
Maintaining Earth’s biodiversity, one seed at a time.
Young Kari basks in the delicia tree’s shade. Old Otis tells her that when he was young, the trees grew everywhere. Kari can’t imagine such abundance. Now there’s only one delicia tree; every summer, townsfolk share its fruit. After Kari’s family finishes their portion, she saves the seeds. She asks Otis about planting them to grow more trees. He explains that a blight destroyed the old ones. There’s no cure, so it would kill new plantings, including the remaining tree. Undaunted, Kari develops a “Top Secret Project” to collect seeds and save them in Otis’ freezer. Months later, Kari reveals her surprise to Otis, with a sign over the freezer: “Kari and Otis’s Seed Bank.” He’s delighted, but, shortly after, he and the last delicia tree die. The following year, scientists discover a cure for the blight; Kari plants her seeds. The book ends with the adult Kari, sitting in a delicia orchard, regaling kids with stories about her childhood, when there was only one delicia tree. They can’t even imagine. This uplifting, economically told tale is about hope and how one generation inspires another; it reassuringly reminds children that they can improve the world. The colorful, appealingly childlike illustrations suit the straightforward narrative. Kari is pale-skinned, Otis is brown-skinned, and background kids are diverse.
This sweet story may very well plant seeds of inspiration in readers’ minds. (author’s note) (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781947888449
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Flyaway Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the...
Rhymed couplets convey the story of a girl who likes to build things but is shy about it. Neither the poetry nor Rosie’s projects always work well.
Rosie picks up trash and oddments where she finds them, stashing them in her attic room to work on at night. Once, she made a hat for her favorite zookeeper uncle to keep pythons away, and he laughed so hard that she never made anything publicly again. But when her great-great-aunt Rose comes to visit and reminds Rosie of her own past building airplanes, she expresses her regret that she still has not had the chance to fly. Great-great-aunt Rose is visibly modeled on Rosie the Riveter, the iconic, red-bandanna–wearing poster woman from World War II. Rosie decides to build a flying machine and does so (it’s a heli-o-cheese-copter), but it fails. She’s just about to swear off making stuff forever when Aunt Rose congratulates her on her failure; now she can go on to try again. Rosie wears her hair swooped over one eye (just like great-great-aunt Rose), and other figures have exaggerated hairdos, tiny feet and elongated or greatly rounded bodies. The detritus of Rosie’s collections is fascinating, from broken dolls and stuffed animals to nails, tools, pencils, old lamps and possibly an erector set. And cheddar-cheese spray.
Earnest and silly by turns, it doesn’t quite capture the attention or the imagination, although surely its heart is in the right place. (historical note) (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0845-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd.
This British import is an imaginatively constructed sequence of images that show a white boy examining a city pavement, clearly in London, and the sights he would see if he were able to travel down to the Earth’s core and then back again to the surface.
The geologic layers are depicted in 10 vertical spreads that require a 90-degree turn to be read and include endpapers, which open out, concertina fashion, to show the interior of the Earth to its core. Beneath the urban setting are drains, pipes, and artifacts of urban infrastructure. Below that, archaeological relics are revealed. An Underground train speeds by, and below it, a stalactite-encrusted cave yawns. Deep below the Earth’s crust, magma, the Earth’s mantle, and the inner core are shown. Turn the page to start going up again, back through the mantle to the crust, where precious minerals are revealed, then fossils, tree roots, and animal burrows, ending with the same boy in the English countryside. The painted, stenciled, and collaged illustrations are full-bleed, and the tones graduate pleasantly from light colors at the surface of the Earth to rich pinks, yellows, and oranges as readers near the Earth’s core. The text is informative, if lacking in poetry, including such nuggets as “earthworms are expert recyclers, eating dead plants in the soil.”
An unusual offering for the young geology nerd. (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68297-136-9
Page Count: 20
Publisher: Words & Pictures
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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