A spellbinding tour, deeply rooted in both fact and feeling.
A poetic salute to the world’s forests and many of the wonders they contain.
The beauty and visual depth that inform Chock’s stately forest scenes, rich in color and photographically exact in detail, find suitable echoes in Beckerman’s alliterative, sensual free verse. “Munching mouthfuls of bursting blueberries, / you inhale fertile earth while hunting for / morels and fairy circles.” The tour begins in a misty temperate forest, then branches out to encompass other forest types and locales, from lush Amazonian rain forest to oyamel firs hung about with migrant monarch butterflies in a “tangerine dream,” a stand of Japanese bamboo dappled with swirls of sunlight, an urban forest, and even an underwater kelp forest with a drowsy otter nosing through. In prose commentary running beneath, the author clearly describes each type and, for specific sites, what makes each distinctive. Along the way, she fills readers in on the ways wildlife, trees, and fungi interact, as well as on the effects and increasing dangers of wildfires; in the backmatter she offers useful guidelines for planting trees and conserving shrinking woodlands. “So much to see,” she writes, “to smell, / to hear, / to taste, / to feel.” Small human figures appear occasionally, but typically in silhouette or facing away from viewers.
A spellbinding tour, deeply rooted in both fact and feeling. (author’s and illustrator’s notes, further reading and viewing, more fascinating forests) (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781546130970
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Orchard/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched.
An amiable introduction to our thrifty, sociable, teeming insect cousins.
Bunting notes that all the ants on Earth weigh roughly the same as all the people and observes that ants (like, supposedly, us) love recycling, helping others, and taking “micronaps.” They, too, live in groups, and their “superpower” is an ability to work together to accomplish amazing things. Bunting goes on to describe different sorts of ants within the colony (“Drone. Male. Does no housework. Takes to the sky. Reproduces. Drops dead”), how they communicate using pheromones, and how they get from egg to adult. He concludes that we could learn a lot from them that would help us leave our planet in better shape than it was when we arrived. If he takes a pass on mentioning a few less positive shared traits (such as our tendency to wage war on one another), still, his comparisons do invite young readers to observe the natural world more closely and to reflect on our connections to it. In the simple illustrations, generic black ants look up at viewers with little googly eyes while scurrying about the pages gathering food, keeping nests clean, and carrying outsized burdens.
Lighthearted and informative, though the premise may be a bit stretched. (Informational picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567784
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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