Sublime.
An artistic meditation on gestation.
Turning publishing convention on its head, the illustrations came first in this stunning, extra-long picture book. Sanna’s watercolors, originally created for a wordless book published in Italy, depict the nine months of human gestation with sequential spreads of a pregnant woman’s growing torso, crescendoing to birth. Her belly increasingly protrudes with successive page turns, but it is not merely a woman standing still; instead, the illustrations can be read both as an expectant mother’s body and as the curved wings of a sea gull, the arc of a whale’s tail, and the sloping descent of a hillside. This merging of the body and the natural world emphasizes humanity’s place in the circle of life while presenting breathtaking visuals. The accompanying, poetic text guides readers through successive images, shifting focus to the developing fetus through direct address. “Month 4” reads, for example: “And while you are still learning to breathe / Patterns are drawn on your fingertips for you and you alone.” Corresponding backmatter pages offer “Developmental Facts that Inspired the Text” (which, unfortunately, are unsourced). For Month 4 this expository text reads, in part, “The fetus’s lungs are not completely formed yet, but it has started to practice respiratory movements. Fingerprints and footprints are being defined.” It’s a sophisticated offering, perhaps better suited for baby showers than nurseries, but it’s lovely all the same.
Sublime. (Picture book. 5-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59270-255-8
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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