“You are an astronaut! These are your crewmates. You are going to Mars!” So begins an alphabet book of Mars for beginning science enthusiasts. Handsome watercolor drawings show a multiracial crew of eight kids and a pet cat as they suit up, board the spacecraft, and set off for Mars. The journey will take more than three years. The paintings and brief captions describe life aboard the space ship, Mars landing, exploration, experiments, and travel back home. Many pictures show the crew and cat floating inside the spacecraft, astronauts working, sleeping, and exercising in zero gravity. The title concludes with an A-B-Cyclopedia of additional Mars facts. Front end papers show a handsome drawing of the solar system, while back end papers show the orbit of the Mars space voyage. Younger children will read the illustrations and search for the alphabet letters while more able readers will explore the impressive number of facts in the brief captions, for example: “How far will you travel? The orbit of Mars is approximately 49 million miles from Earth, but because the planets are moving, your spacecraft is following an elliptical path of more than 300 million miles.” No sources are given, but Dr. Edgett is a research scientist working with pictures from the Mars Surveyor Project. A beginning science title to spur the imagination. (Nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-399-23214-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
Scotton makes a stylish debut with this tale of a sleepless sheep—depicted as a blocky, pop-eyed, very soft-looking woolly with a skinny striped nightcap of unusual length—trying everything, from stripping down to his spotted shorts to counting all six hundred million billion and ten stars, twice, in an effort to doze off. Not even counting sheep . . . well, actually, that does work, once he counts himself. Dawn finds him tucked beneath a rather-too-small quilt while the rest of his flock rises to bathe, brush and riffle through the Daily Bleat. Russell doesn’t have quite the big personality of Ian Falconer’s Olivia, but more sophisticated fans of the precocious piglet will find in this art the same sort of daffy urbanity. Quite a contrast to the usual run of ovine-driven snoozers, like Phyllis Root’s Ten Sleepy Sheep, illustrated by Susan Gaber (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)
Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059848-4
Page Count: 40
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
This second early biography of Cousteau in a year echoes Jennifer Berne’s Manfish: A Story of Jacques Cousteau (2008), illustrated by Eric Puybaret, in offering visuals that are more fanciful than informational, but also complements it with a focus less on the early life of the explorer and eco-activist than on his later inventions and achievements. In full-bleed scenes that are often segmented and kaleidoscopic, Yaccarino sets his hook-nosed subject amid shoals of Impressionistic fish and other marine images, rendered in multiple layers of thinly applied, imaginatively colored paint. His customarily sharp, geometric lines take on the wavy translucence of undersea shapes with a little bit of help from the airbrush. Along with tracing Cousteau’s undersea career from his first, life-changing, pair of goggles and the later aqualung to his minisub Sea Flea, the author pays tribute to his revolutionary film and TV work, and his later efforts to call attention to the effects of pollution. Cousteau’s enduring fascination with the sea comes through clearly, and can’t help sparking similar feelings in readers. (chronology, source list) (Picture book/biography. 6-8)
Pub Date: March 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-85573-3
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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