Fundament-ally sound approach to natural history, with built-in hilarity.
The fourth entry in a tail-wagging game for young animal lovers.
With a fresh set of artfully angled and framed photos, Lavelle again challenges viewers to guess whether they’re looking at the “fetching faces” or “beguiling butts” of 13 creatures, from a pink fairy armadillo to an emperor penguin. Turning the page reveals not only the answer, with a full-body photo, but boxes of pun-laden invitations to “Face the Facts” or go “Beyond the Backside” to learn a few basics about each animal’s habits and habitat. “You can’t spell ‘repeat’ without e-a-t,” she writes, for example, about the quokka’s habit of chowing down on food it has just barfed up, and thanks to coral-like tubercules on its skin that help it hide from predators, the reef-dwelling pygmy seahorse is “hard to sea!” “What a re-leaf!” she notes after describing how, once a week, sloths slowly travel to the forest floor to defecate. As usual, she ends with a clever kicker—a baby wombat peeking from its mom’s backward facing pouch, so that both answers are correct—on the way to closing deposits of additional data.
Fundament-ally sound approach to natural history, with built-in hilarity. (author’s note, sources, map) (Informational picture book. 5-7)Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464233067
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks eXplore
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
