Per the series promise, a slightly “unhinged” celebration of daring diving developments.
A rhyming account of the invention of the bathysphere.
Fascinated by the ocean depths, Will Beebe dives in to invent a way to explore beyond the shallow depths that diving equipment of the 1920s allows. His designs and “silly proposals and doodles” from other inventors go “straight to the trashcan,” however, until Otis Barton gets involved. Barton, an engineer, “[has] his heart set on—PLOP!—disappearing / Beneath the sea’s surface and breaking all records / For deepness” and knows that Beebe’s “soda-can shape” will crumple under deepwater pressure. Beebe adopts Barton’s stronger, spherical design, and, luckily, Barton’s family is rich enough to fund its construction. Despite personality clashes, minor design failures, seasickness, and the Great Depression, Beebe and Barton create a two-person vessel that descends almost a half mile. Today, the original bathysphere is displayed outside the New York (City) Aquarium. Next to Barb Rosenstock’s prose account in Otis & Will Discover the Deep (illustrated by Katherine Roy, 2018), Enik’s playfully rhyming couplets feel lightweight, but the backmatter, which includes the bathysphere’s schematic, a timeline of human diving progress, and a biography of Gloria Hollister (the first mate and recorder on deck), provides some heft. Cartoon illustrations portray Beebe, Barton, and Hollister as white adults.
Per the series promise, a slightly “unhinged” celebration of daring diving developments. (Picture book. 5-8)Pub Date: Sept. 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7643-5793-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Schiffer
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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
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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