Lots of great possibilities for fending off boredom.
This breezy compendium of simple ideas for solitary and group entertainment offers something for nearly everyone.
A range of activities are presented in a way that is not tied to specific dates or holidays, creating a versatile, browsable collection. The variety of options for interactive and solitary amusement suggests an appealing reprieve from screens for families dealing with travel, rainy days, or simply needing to redirect attention. Camp counselors and youth group leaders will find plenty of entertaining and usable material here. Card games, word games, paper folding, crafts, simple art projects, recipes, and active games are intermingled, adding to the appeal of browsing randomly. Some are quick diversions, others require planning, time, space, or equipment. Most are well within the reach of 8- to 12-year-olds; many could be used with younger children or in mixed-age groups. Adults will want to vet activities and crafts for environmental impact (as with those involving balloons or toilet paper, for example), dietary or safety issues, or messes and risks that might be undesirable. The entire presentation is cheerfully designed and clearly presented in a friendly, unfussy format, with a brief introduction and list of all the activities at the front. Clear, concise visual and written instructions and uncluttered cartoon art accompany each activity. Icons indicate categories for those searching for particular kinds of projects: outdoors, games, recipes, tricks, science experiments, ones requiring imagination, and ones with no supplies needed.
Lots of great possibilities for fending off boredom. (Activity book. 4-12)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-75588-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Odd Dot
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40.
From two Nobel Peace Prize winners, an invitation to look past sadness and loneliness to the joy that surrounds us.
Bobbing in the wake of 2016’s heavyweight Book of Joy (2016), this brief but buoyant address to young readers offers an earnest insight: “If you just focus on the thing that is making / you sad, then the sadness is all you see. / But if you look around, you will / see that joy is everywhere.” López expands the simply delivered proposal in fresh and lyrical ways—beginning with paired scenes of the authors as solitary children growing up in very different circumstances on (as they put it) “opposite sides of the world,” then meeting as young friends bonded by streams of rainbow bunting and going on to share their exuberantly hued joy with a group of dancers diverse in terms of age, race, culture, and locale while urging readers to do the same. Though on the whole this comes off as a bit bland (the banter and hilarity that characterized the authors’ recorded interchanges are absent here) and their advice just to look away from the sad things may seem facile in view of what too many children are inescapably faced with, still, it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world more qualified to deliver such a message than these two. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Hundreds of pages of unbridled uplift boiled down to 40. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-48423-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
Science at its best: informative and gross.
Why not? Because “IT’S FULL OF GERMS.”
Of course, Ben-Barak rightly notes, so is everything else—from your socks to the top of Mount Everest. Just to demonstrate, he invites readers to undertake an exploratory adventure (only partly imaginary): First touch a certain seemingly blank spot on the page to pick up a microbe named Min, then in turn touch teeth, shirt, and navel to pick up Rae, Dennis, and Jake. In the process, readers watch crews of other microbes digging cavities (“Hey kid, brush your teeth less”), spreading “lovely filth,” and chowing down on huge rafts of dead skin. For the illustrations, Frost places dialogue balloons and small googly-eyed cartoon blobs of diverse shape and color onto Rundgren’s photographs, taken using a scanning electron microscope, of the fantastically rugged surfaces of seemingly smooth paper, a tooth, textile fibers, and the jumbled crevasses in a belly button. The tour concludes with more formal introductions and profiles for Min and the others: E. coli, Streptococcus, Aspergillus niger, and Corynebacteria. “Where will you take Min tomorrow?” the author asks teasingly. Maybe the nearest bar of soap.
Science at its best: informative and gross. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-17536-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Neal Porter/Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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