Young people lucky enough to find this miraculous collection in their hands will indeed look.
This anthology provides instruction on an eclectic sprawl of topics: walking on Mars, toasting marshmallows, telling the difference between goblins and elves, and more.
A table of contents readies readers and makes this zany collection feel orderly. “How to Build a Poem” comes first, celebrating the craft that underpins poetry and “words that hammer, / words that nail, / words that saw, / words that sail, / words that whisper, / words that wail.” Children immediately feel the pull of all the verse ahead. Contemporary poems make up the bulk of this collection, but a few poems reach across swaths of time. Robert Louis Stevenson’s brilliantly evocative “The Swing” proves how a great poem endures. Children will soar hearing, “Up in the air I go flying again, / Up in the air and down!” All of the poems offer exhilarating construction while speaking directly to children about topics young people hold close to their hearts (haircuts, riding a new bike, rules). Depicting a diverse gathering of children, these mellow painted illustrations feel at once soft and gravely, with crosshatching, textures, and lines. The engaging artwork nudges the poems into the foreground, giving them ample room to breathe. The collection closes with “How to Pay Attention,” just two lines that are almost a sacred offering. “Close this book. / Look.”
Young people lucky enough to find this miraculous collection in their hands will indeed look. (Picture book/poetry. 6-11)Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7636-8168-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two.
Rollicking verses on “numerous” topics.
Returning to the theme of her Mathematickles! (2003), illustrated by Steven Salerno, Franco gathers mostly new ruminations with references to numbers or arithmetical operations. “Do numerals get out of sorts? / Do fractions get along? / Do equal signs complain and gripe / when kids get problems wrong?” Along with universal complaints, such as why 16 dirty socks go into a washing machine but only 12 clean ones come out or why there are “three months of summer / but nine months of school!" (“It must have been grown-ups / who made up / that rule!”), the poet offers a series of numerical palindromes, a phone number guessing game, a two-voice poem for performative sorts, and, to round off the set, a cozy catalog of countable routines: “It’s knowing when night falls / and darkens my bedroom, / my pup sleeps just two feet from me. / That watching the stars flicker / in the velvety sky / is my glimpse of infinity!” Tey takes each entry and runs with it, adding comically surreal scenes of appropriately frantic or settled mood, generally featuring a diverse group of children joined by grotesques that look like refugees from Hieronymous Bosch paintings. (This book was reviewed digitally.)
Readers can count on plenty of chuckles along with a mild challenge or two. (Poetry/mathematical picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0116-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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