No hype here: understated enchantment.
Spare, rhyming text and detailed artwork inform readers about the life cycle of a sycamore tree, from seed to maturity—and its role in the ecosystem.
“It starts with a seed,” proclaims the dark ink across from art that shows one helicopter seed in the foreground, dozens gently falling in the background, and a small line of stubble at the bottom, representing the ground. High-quality, cream-colored paper, pencil-framed margins, a well-chosen palette, and excellent use of negative space begin here and continue throughout. The poem continues over two more page turns: “But where does it lead? // To a root, to a shoot, / to a few tiny leaves.” Exquisite, naturalistically rendered ink-and-watercolor art encourages readers to pause at each double-page spread. As the tree ages—and subtly shows a hint of sentience—more and more animals assemble in its branches and in the ground surrounding its roots. An abundance of nouns, verbs, and adjectives describing the tree’s growth effortlessly increases vocabularies, spread by spread and stanza by stanza. At the end, a foldout uses one page to re-create the entire text as one poem and then offers more information, in prose, about sycamores. While giving a general idea of how one journey from seed to tree influences an entire ecosystem, the text also emphasizes the wonder of growth—and life—itself. The tone is soothing and reverential.
No hype here: understated enchantment. (Informational picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-910277-26-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Words & Pictures
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Wow.
The stories of the births of the universe, the planet Earth, and a human child are told in this picture book.
Bauer begins with cosmic nothing: “In the dark / in the deep, deep dark / a speck floated / invisible as thought / weighty as God.” Her powerful words build the story of the creation of the universe, presenting the science in poetic free verse. First, the narrative tells of the creation of stars by the Big Bang, then the explosions of some of those stars, from which dust becomes the matter that coalesces into planets, then the creation of life on Earth: a “lucky planet…neither too far / nor too near…its yellow star…the Sun.” Holmes’ digitally assembled hand-marbled paper-collage illustrations perfectly pair with the text—in fact the words and illustrations become an inseparable whole, as together they both delineate and suggest—the former telling the story and the latter, with their swirling colors suggestive of vast cosmos, contributing the atmosphere. It’s a stunning achievement to present to readers the factual events that created the birth of the universe, the planet Earth, and life on Earth with such an expressive, powerful creativity of words paired with illustrations so evocative of the awe and magic of the cosmos. But then the story goes one brilliant step further and gives the birth of a child the same beginning, the same sense of magic, the same miracle.
Wow. (Picture book. 3-8)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-7883-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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