A pleasant dive into deep waters.
Explore ocean basics in illustrated storybook format.
Ocean narrates and is represented by two large, cheerful blue eyes, a crescent-moon mouth, and disembodied, impossibly elastic arms. Facts are shared conversationally, with vocabulary such as “dude,” “stoked,” and “chaa.” The sentences gather and bend with illustrations, set in contrasting type that occasionally changes color to balance color schemes or emphasize key concepts. Information about the ocean’s layers and marine features are presented with concise language and loads of visual interest. Double-page spreads teem with ocean life painted in warm, bright colors. A map serves as illustration when Ocean talks about land arriving—grown-ups may need to clarify that Earth’s continents were not always in this current state. Ocean waits until readers are all drawn in and enjoying the wonders to reveal problems like trash islands and ice melt. Consumer-level actions for ocean advocacy are included in the aftermatter, but solutions and action are not discussed in the primary text. A handful of unnamed human characters have diverse skin tones and homogenous body types. Conceptualizing one ocean instead of four nods to global accountability while also allowing for character development.
A pleasant dive into deep waters. (author’s note, bibliography) (Informational picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-10809-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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
Enticing and eco-friendly.
Why and how to make a rain garden.
Having watched through their classroom window as a “rooftop-rushing, gutter-gushing” downpour sloppily flooded their streets and playground, several racially diverse young children follow their tan-skinned teacher outside to lay out a shallow drainage ditch beneath their school’s downspout, which leads to a patch of ground, where they plant flowers (“native ones with tough, thick roots,” Schaub specifies) to absorb the “mucky runoff” and, in time, draw butterflies and other wildlife. The author follows up her lilting rhyme with more detailed explanations of a rain garden’s function and construction, including a chart to help determine how deep to make the rain garden and a properly cautionary note about locating a site’s buried utility lines before starting to dig; she concludes with a set of leads to online information sources. Gómez goes more for visual appeal than realism. In her scenes, a group of smiling, round-headed, very small children in rain gear industriously lay large stones along a winding border with little apparent effort; nevertheless, her images of the little ones planting generic flowers that are tall and lush just a page turn later do make the outdoorsy project look like fun.
Enticing and eco-friendly. (Picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781324052357
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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