A superficial jaunt through the age of the Rubik’s Cube, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the Walkman.
Dip a toe into ancient history.
Salting her poptastic narrative with slang expressions for extra flava (“People were psyched to talk on cordless phones and leave a message on an answering machine”), Michaels harks back to the fads, fashions, “rad” toys, “gnarly” entertainments, and unwieldy tech that kick-started the millennial generation. The bare lists of names here aren’t going to give today’s readers much sense of what popular toys or Saturday morning cartoons looked like or why they appealed to those born in the ’80s…but even younger children will have no trouble marveling at, say, TVs with no remotes (“you had to manually change the channel!”) or, for that matter, seeing the effect on their elders of resurrecting nearly forgotten terms like mullet and boom box. On the whole, however, it’s fairly shallow, though a closing suggestion to ask grown-ups for memories or even mementos of the decade may well spark a bit of cozy intergenerational give-and-take. While the children portrayed in the cartoon images are diverse, the stock photos mostly depict White-presenting kids.
A superficial jaunt through the age of the Rubik’s Cube, Cabbage Patch Kids, and the Walkman. (Informational early reader. 6-8)Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781665933476
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Simon Spotlight
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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