Fun facts for future foodies.
A brightly colored exploration of the origins and evolution of popular foods, from ice cream to pasta and pizza to french fries.
Each two-page spread introduces a different item with a short rhyme before defining the food, explaining its origins and evolution, and offering a brief fact. Occasionally, the rhyming text feels forced, and some explanations can be confusing or contradictory. The author notes that a churro is “piped sweet dough that is fried in hot oil and then sprinkled with sugar” but then later says that the Chinese youtiao doughnut is “similar to a churro, but it’s not piped, covered in sugar or dunked in chocolate.” Readers may wonder what the similarities are. Still, kids fascinated by food will find plenty to interest them—for instance, a discussion of the Jewish roots of fish and chips or how the jerk chicken we know was born when Africans in Jamaica fleeing slavery opted to prepare their meat using the smokeless pit method to avoid being detected. The crisp, full-page illustrations elucidate the text; a map at the end charts the journeys of the various foods mentioned, though it’s slightly difficult to decipher due to the low-contrast background.
Fun facts for future foodies. (Informational picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781636551319
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Red Comet Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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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