Certain to cultivate a love of nature in all who pick it up.
An aptly named child proves that anyone, anywhere, can be a birder.
Sparrow, a Black girl with her hair in twists, lives in a bustling town filled with noises such as car horns and barking dogs, but the town still has plenty of birds to observe. She heads outside, carrying a sketch pad and crayons, and “uses her eyes and ears.” She notices the ways different species move (“Thrashers hide in the bushes. Robins hop on the ground”), their colors (“Mourning doves are brown and gray”), and their different songs. Burgess includes birds that are reasonably common in the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. and Canada. The backmatter concludes with information about each of the 17 species that Sparrow sees, including size, color, habitat, and diet, as might be found in a birding guidebook. Anthony’s lively digital illustrations range from vignettes to double-page spreads. The book includes a nice variety, from close-ups to more distant scenes featuring a wide-eyed, animated child watching through her binoculars or mimicking the birds’ behaviors. Realistically, several images feature a yellow bird that never does get identified. In an author’s note, Burgess, an ornithologist, describes growing up in the suburbs, observing the birds around her; she stresses that readers need not live in a rural environment to become birders. Amid recent efforts to diversify bird-watching, this inviting work is especially welcome.
Certain to cultivate a love of nature in all who pick it up. (bird-watching tips, resources) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9780316307222
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano Books
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Hee haw.
The print version of a knee-slapping cumulative ditty.
In the song, Smith meets a donkey on the road. It is three-legged, and so a “wonky donkey” that, on further examination, has but one eye and so is a “winky wonky donkey” with a taste for country music and therefore a “honky-tonky winky wonky donkey,” and so on to a final characterization as a “spunky hanky-panky cranky stinky-dinky lanky honky-tonky winky wonky donkey.” A free musical recording (of this version, anyway—the author’s website hints at an adults-only version of the song) is available from the publisher and elsewhere online. Even though the book has no included soundtrack, the sly, high-spirited, eye patch–sporting donkey that grins, winks, farts, and clumps its way through the song on a prosthetic metal hoof in Cowley’s informal watercolors supplies comical visual flourishes for the silly wordplay. Look for ready guffaws from young audiences, whether read or sung, though those attuned to disability stereotypes may find themselves wincing instead or as well.
Hee haw. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-26124-1
Page Count: 26
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor
Having surveyed worms, spiders, flies, and head lice, Gravel continues her Disgusting Critters series with a quick hop through toad fact and fancy.
The facts are briefly presented in a hand-lettered–style typeface frequently interrupted by visually emphatic interjections (“TOXIN,” “PREY,” “EWWW!”). These are, as usual, paired to simply drawn cartoons with comments and punch lines in dialogue balloons. After casting glances at the common South American ancestor of frogs and toads, and at such exotic species as the Emei mustache toad (“Hey ladies!”), Gravel focuses on the common toad, Bufo bufo. Using feminine pronouns throughout, she describes diet and egg-laying, defense mechanisms, “warts,” development from tadpole to adult, and of course how toads shed and eat their skins. Noting that global warming and habitat destruction have rendered some species endangered or extinct, she closes with a plea and, harking back to those South American origins, an image of an outsized toad, arm in arm with a dark-skinned lad (in a track suit), waving goodbye: “Hasta la vista!”
A light dose of natural history, with occasional “EWWW!” for flavor . (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-77049-667-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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