With its undistinguished poetry but warm feelings and appealing paintings, this is an additional choice for some home...
Snuggling families, whether human or animal, are comforting and reassuring presences at bedtime.
Bookended by sentimentalized portraits of a white mother and two small white children in their pajamas, the verse starts off with exalted language: “When Mother Earth bids goodnight, / she casts her shafts of silver light. / She says: ‘Goodnight, my precious ones.’ / Nature’s song has just begun.” The scene switches to the natural world and successive double-page spreads are filled with lush, vibrantly colored paintings that usually show a parent animal and its young one(s) at night in their environment. Rhyming couplets describe each scene, not always smoothly: “Nene young quieting, / get warm below their mama’s wing,” reads the text as the illustration presents goslings and their mother among hibiscus blooms. The animal paintings are realistic and engaging, but there is no sense of accurate scale. The animals included are threatened or endangered by issues including human encroachment, climate change, and animal predators. These are described briefly in the backmatter. There is an unfortunate editorial mistake; a description of a red-tailed Amazon parrot has been substituted for the toucan pictured in the primary text. The book ends with an upbeat page, inexplicably lacking illustrations but detailing a few animals whose numbers have recently rebounded. There is no map and only one web resource.
With its undistinguished poetry but warm feelings and appealing paintings, this is an additional choice for some home libraries. (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-88448-557-5
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Tilbury House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap.
Budding naturalists who dug We Dig Worms! (2015) will, well, coo over this similarly enlightening accolade.
A curmudgeonly park visitor’s “They’re RATS with wings!” sparks spirited rejoinders from a racially diverse flock of children wearing full-body bird outfits, who swoop down to deliver a mess of pigeon facts. Along with being related to the dodo, “rock doves” fly faster than a car, mate for life, have been crossbred into all sorts of “fancies,” inspired Pablo Picasso to name his daughter “Paloma” in their honor, can be eaten (“Tastes like chicken”), and, like penguins and flamingos, create “pigeon milk” in their crops for their hatchlings. Painted on light blue art paper—“the kind,” writes McCloskey in his afterword, “used by Picasso”—expertly depicted pigeons of diverse breeds common and fancy strut their stuff, with views of the children and other wild creatures, plus occasional helpful labels, interspersed. In the chastened parkgoer’s eyes, as in those of the newly independent readers to whom this is aimed, the often maligned birds are “wonderful.” Cue a fresh set of costumed children on the final page, gearing up to set him straight on squirrels.
Another feather in McCloskey’s cap. (Graphic informational early reader. 5-7)Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-935179-93-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: TOON Books & Graphics
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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