A compellingly told story of a quietly brilliant feminist figure.
Off the craggy coast of Ireland in 1899, self-taught scientist Maude Delap captures a jellyfish from her rowboat and embarks on an unprecedented scientific journey.
Like most girls and women in her community, Maude has never attended school. But her intrinsic curiosity ignites an interest in marine life on Valentia, the island where she lives. Jellyfish are difficult to raise in captivity, which makes studying them a challenge, but Maude isn’t deterred. She brings a worthy specimen to her makeshift home laboratory. Over the course of 10 months, the medusa—the term for an adult jellyfish—produces larvae, which become tiny polyps, then transform into pulsing ephyrae, fed and nurtured by Maude until one reaches adulthood (even devouring all the others!). Maude becomes the first person to raise a jellyfish in captivity, studying it throughout a complete life cycle. Detailed backmatter notes that Maude was well respected in the field, despite gender discrimination and her lack of education. Illustrations have a cut-paper feel, lending a cozy depth to each scene with overlapping colors and textures. Calming, muted oceanic hues evoke a foggy Irish coastline. Each unique jellyfish floats in delicate, translucent layers of creamy pink. Maude and her family are light-skinned. The captivating narrative occasionally addresses readers (“Whoa! Did you see that?”), balancing unfamiliar scientific terminology with an easy, conversational tone.
A compellingly told story of a quietly brilliant feminist figure. (more on jellyfish, author’s and illustrator’s notes, further reading, photo) (Picture-book biography. 5-8)Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781623545819
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort.
A look at the unique ways that 11 globe-spanning animal species construct their homes.
Each creature garners two double-page spreads, which Cherrix enlivens with compelling and at-times jaw-dropping facts. The trapdoor spider constructs a hidden burrow door from spider silk. Sticky threads, fanning from the entrance, vibrate “like a silent doorbell” when walked upon by unwitting insect prey. Prairie dogs expertly dig communal burrows with designated chambers for “sleeping, eating, and pooping.” The largest recorded “town” occupied “25,000 miles and housed as many as 400 million prairie dogs!” Female ants are “industrious insects” who can remove more than a ton of dirt from their colony in a year. Cathedral termites use dirt and saliva to construct solar-cooled towers 30 feet high. Sasaki’s lively pictures borrow stylistically from the animal compendiums of mid-20th-century children’s lit; endpapers and display type elegantly suggest the blues of cyanotypes and architectural blueprints. Jarringly, the lead spread cheerfully extols the prowess of the corals of the Great Barrier Reef, “the world’s largest living structure,” while ignoring its accelerating, human-abetted destruction. Calamitously, the honeybee hive is incorrectly depicted as a paper-wasps’ nest, and the text falsely states that chewed beeswax “hardens into glue to shape the hive.” (This book was reviewed digitally.)
An arguable error of omission and definite errors of commission sink this otherwise attractive effort. (selected sources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5344-5625-9
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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