Review: Dolphin Baby!

Dolphin Baby! by Nicola Davies

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Just to start I have to say how annoyed I am at the informational book titles with the exclamation mark. I can imagine the editors' meeting: "Hmmm. Dolphin baby just doesn't sound interesting enough--how about 'Dolphin Baby!'" It's like they're apologizing for presenting an uninteresting topic.

The differentiated text in this book matches a third-person 'looking in on' narrative with factual vignettes at the edges of each double. Granström's style gives the fuzzy feel of looking at things underwater in the not-quite-clear ocean. The font (Ice Age D) made me feel the same way, so this was a consistent choice by an uncredited designer. Editors didn't list the font for the vignettes, which looks handwritten but isn't, and was just as important a choice. It looks like the designer had Granström draw the mom's 'name' as if it were a signature, and just copied that image in every time as if it were a signature stamp.

Because the color scheme depends mostly on blue, gray, black and white (a little pink for the dolphins), Granström uses contrast and compositional layout as her main devices. One of the most compelling pages is the spread where the baby dives down deep and I see a lot of darkness and some foreboding hammerheads off in the distance.

As a visual grammar (what I mean by grammar: the meaningful relationship between parts), the 'camera' moves back and forth between mid-range shots and close-ups. There are no long range shots, so the expanse of the ocean is given up in favor of visiting close up with these characters. There is little here to suggest that we consider what is off frame. The close-ups do crop off the bodies, which lends to the feeling of closeness. But with the mid-range shots, we are led into a comfortable setting where the point of view makes us think we are seeing all there is to see. The most interesting visual spread was the one where the left side was split into a one-quarter frame and showed an overhead view looking down from the sky (like the birds that dive down in the right 3/4 frame). The divider for this 1/4 - 3/4 spread was painted instead of put in by a designer. I liked this 'diptych' style, and wished she had used more techniques like this to vary the visual relationships (grammar).



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Review: Nic Bishop Snakes

Nic Bishop Snakes by Nic Bishop

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Bishop's franchise uses a boilerplate technique that works well for an informational series. It's hard to argue with large full-color close-up photos of animals in action. Bishop's photos are extremely powerful manipulations of light and color, and the design of the text and facing pages is done to complement the photo work. Kudos to designer Nancy Sabato, who paid close attention to doing something on every spread to make it all work. Many other designers who pay this close attention would clutter things up. It's very simple, streamlined design. The intense photographs are what makes this book better than wikipedia.

Bishop clearly points me to his web site for information on the making of the book, and further sources. However, the web site is disappointing. Instead of a deep and rich set of sources that couldn't go into the book, it's like 2-3 other sources beyond the ones in the book, and then a boilerplate description of how he does his books. For an NSTA award book it feels like Bishop rides his PhD credentials more than describing his research and sources--is authority what NSTA respects, or science method? In his description of method, he makes the point that his photography is what forces him to do close observation and that he learns more this way than from books. But it's not books I want him to source--I want him to show me for a book on snakes that he's gotten as close as he reasonably can to the current research in herpetology.

Two types of differentiated words: 2-3 sentence captions (with a scale guide for the size of the snake); and about ten lines of body text. One type of visual--the close-up photo focusing strongly on featuring the distinctive heads of each type of snake. The one fold-out page is clearly a gimmick, because on so many of the other doubles, Sabato let the photo take the whole spread across the gutter. So there was no 'need' for a foldout. But it's one of the gimmicks we like in info books. When is the foldout actually strongest in its function as opposed to providing just an extra tactile thing to do?



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Review: Frogs!: Strange and Wonderful

Frogs!: Strange and Wonderful by Laurence Pringle

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The best thing about this book is Henderson's illustration. The photo-realism is among the best I've seen in the trompe-l'oeil tradition. This is because at first glance and from a distance it looks like photography, but when I stopped and actually looked and started to read, it was easy to see the watercolor technique. So it doesn't have the saturated or airbrushed feel the photorealism of the 1980s had.

As differentiated text, this book brings up some interesting feature issues. In words, the book only deals with two main structures: labeled 'portraits' of types of frogs, and the 'chapter' text itself. Each double page spread is a self-contained sub-topic (or sometimes two topics, one for each page), which is a good form of differentiation that clearly encourages browsing. I thought it was interesting that Pringle (and the book's unnamed designer) decided not to use any kind of titles or headers to call out these topics. In a way, I like this, because it lets the visuals dominate while the topic sentences clearly introduce the focus of the 'chapter'.

In pictures, this book is designed to inform me in a wider variety of ways--far more differentiated than the words are. There's one page about eyesight where a set of six frog heads are set in a 2x3 table so we can clearly compare and contrast. On the same double there is a cutaway from a whole picture of just the specialized foot. On the next page, there is a 'graphic novel' style showing a slowed down depiction of the toad unfolding its tongue to eat a moth. THIS kind of visual variety actually changes with almost every page, which is the strength of this book! Big question: Was this a collaborative decision between Pringle and Henderson, or is this visual effort all Henderson's? I'll need to look at some of their other books to see...



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Review: Ladybugs

Ladybugs by Gail Gibbons

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



(Advance warning--this post isn't much about Gibbons' pre-K book.)

Not being a librarian I had no idea how many ladybug books there were out there. How does this become the number one topic for insect books? (In a way, it seems racist--very anti-aphid, if you ask me.) Looks like there's one 2008 title from Scholastic on aphids without even a cover photo on goodreads (see B&N or google books for the cover).

The ladybug book is a pretty good example of passive censorship. When the market trends one direction, and ladybugs become super popular, then we realize that the decisions on what doesn't get published are all made behind closed doors. A good old-fashioned book banning is so easy to see and decry as censorship, but it happens far less than we would like to think, and far less successfully today than ever before. The more difficult form of censorship lives inside the publishing industry that also works to give us so many wonderful books, too! No one pickets around the children's information shelf decrying the inequities of aphids.

The ladybug-aphid picture book inequity is a pretty good example of something being under erasure. We can see the aphid book as a possible sign, but with a fairly clear movement to dismiss it. Within the ladybug book, aphids are never discussed scientifically to discover their purpose and function in the ecosystem--they are only pests and ladybug lunch!

One of the best current picturebooks for shifting the topical conversation is Molly Bang & Penny Chisolm's Ocean Sunlight. Writing a book about plankton is like writing a book about grass. It would take a master to make it interesting! There's more of this needed in the information book industry, or else it's all going to be sharks, dinosaurs, and ladybugs. Down with passive censorship!



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Review: The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure

The Impossible Rescue: The True Story of an Amazing Arctic Adventure by Martin W. Sandler

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Ever since being drawn in by the opening scenes of Frankenstein with the icebound ship, this kind of bleak setting and desperate narrative has been something I enjoy in books. I was dragged on enough winter camps as a scout in the 80s to know that I would absolutely hate it. Butterfield Canyon in the Oquirrhs, 1982, was the worst--we couldn't even nail down the corners of the tents because the snow was so deep, and everyone just stayed up all night with their feet up to the fire. In the morning the soles were melted off most everyone's boots, and we still had another night tho go. But in the abstract being stranded in the arctic is interesting.

I had to do a little research to see what this genre is called: Narrative History is the genre tag that seemed most right. The story is assembled as a story, while trying to stay faithful to the historical facts. This is the traditional version of narrative history, staying chronological.

The graphic design choices are beautiful, making this more like a coffee table book than a picture book or a plain paperback narrative history. Each page is well designed and the photos and drawings are spread throughout the book instead of being chuffed into a center section of plates like we see in this type of history in paperback history for adults. Surprisingly, no graphic design credit! Candlewick had some great folks working on this to make it a gorgeous experience and a great book for the aesthetics of book handling. C'mon Candlewick--credit them even if they're on staff.

Sources are phenomenal, stretching to 28 pages: a 'what happened to each character' section comes first; a timeline; chapter by chapter quote sources; bibliography; photo credits; and index. There is actually a handful of primary sources in the bib, including William McKinley's address to congress, and references to the New Bedford Whaling Museum's artifacts and records (which I used in my whaling projects on bowheads over the past 10 years). Photo credits also lead back to New Bedford, and they have a phenomenal web site. So, a small number of very nice leads out to inquiry and research.

What differentiates this book from what you could learn on the internet? The completeness of the story. All of it in one place, and in careful detail and humanized. The best theme starts out at the very beginning, where the crews and captains of the stranded ships had no concept of disciplining themselves for survival as a group for a whole arctic winter.



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Review: Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building

Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building by Deborah Hopkinson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



The information was good, and the illustrations impeccable. I felt like these illustrations were a very good replacement for the photographs we might expect. Hopkinson cites in the sources a good photography collection by Hine, and used on the end sheets. Ransome's illustration style is just right, using just enough impressionism to avoid photorealism but also giving us a clear representational look at the building process. Point of view makes these paintings interesting, allowing for complex and well balanced compositions.

Design by Ed Miller and Rachael Cole looks like it was done either in collaboration with Ransome. I much preferred the pages where the text was integrated into the picture rather than being placed on a cutaway below or to the side of the pictures. I also wondered if more process couldn't have been introduced like the 1-2-3-4 riveting process featured early on.

The narrative of the boy and his pop is in 2nd person, which felt like a strange choice, but it appears the intent was to make me identify with watching the building go up as a citizen and then visiting it after finished to complete the spectator experience. It's almost like Hopkinson couldn't decide whether to do the story of the boy and his pop or the story of the Sky Boys. Since the title is Sky Boys, I wish she had just stayed with the latter and not messed with the narrative.



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Review: Dogs on Duty: Soldiers' Best Friends on the Battlefield and Beyond

Dogs on Duty: Soldiers' Best Friends on the Battlefield and Beyond by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



What is interesting is that there is enough information on dogs in the military to be interesting! A highly focused topic, but sustained by many pictures and a pseudo-story arc that leads from basic information about working dogs and their training to specific cases of MWD (military working dogs) in recent conflicts in Afghanistan.

Red white and blue graphic design by Regina Roff is mixed with a slightly annoying yellow for a breakout story on almost every double page spread. While the color is a bit too stark, the yellow graphic device does set off the expectation that there will be a complete story on each page in that box. This makes it good differentiated text, with the possibility for a successful reading experience on a single page.

The photos and these single stories are what made this book an engaging aesthetic experience for me.



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Review: Eight Days Gone

Eight Days Gone by Linda McReynolds

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



The sing-song rhythm and rhyming text identify this as intended for preschool readers and probably as a read-aloud. As an informational book, each page probably leaves more questions than it answers while presenting a fairly complete outline story of this Apollo mission (I was disappointed that the Eagle's landing was not given a picture).

The small set of annotated sources and additional information would give a more complete multimedia experience, so it's good that these resources were included and made this a well-sourced book.

The illustrations wholly correspond to text, with no complementary or contrapuntal bits in either pictures or text. This makes the pairing of McReynolds and O'Rourke's work less interesting.

Design by Diane M. Earley was well done, identifying just the right spots for the text and putting the words in alternating black and white to contrast with the light or dark backgrounds.



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Review: Giant Squid: Searching for a Sea Monster

Giant Squid: Searching for a Sea Monster by Mary M. Cerullo

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Trademarked by the Smithsonian and largely about Clyde Roper a Smithsonian scientist, this book was engaging to me largely because when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s there was almost nothing available other than the drawings and odd picture of a fisherman-caught tentacle. It was great to see so many photos gathered all in one place, and to see the results of decades of research pay off in some excellent photos and information about live giant squid. Unlike some of the other books, this one focuses strongly on the squid itself at first, and then turns into the story of the scientists. As a science identity book it turns out great, but it would have been good in the title or somewhere else to help readers know up front how much they could learn about scientist identity by reading this book--Cerullo and Roper do a great job. In particular, the clear focus on how Kubodera picked up the line of research and ended up making the discoveries Roper would have wanted to make himself. A great picture of both teamwork in adding to the body of data, and also competition among scientists to make the find and answer the questions!

The pictures on pp 42-43 were riveting!

Sources could be better. I see a few books, and clear links to the organizations Roper has worked for. But what about direct links to some of the scientific writing? Reports, grant proposals, etc.? Again, a trail to primary research should be the standard in sourcing books like this today. Leading young people to write authentic genres depends on leading them to mentor texts. If we want kids to write like Egyptologists or oceanographers we have to show them the most common writing genres from these people. Let's move this direction!



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Review: Mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



This has been laying about the house for years. I finally picked it up after finishing that last James Rollins junk read. It was a good read. Norbu explicitly tips his hat to H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling in the text. In the text, the former was much more true than the latter. And there was really almost none of Arthur Conan Doyle in this writing at all. This was the most disappointing thing of all--if you pretend to resurrect Holmes from Reichenbach falls you'd better set him to a mystery that depends on his powers! Norbu could have done this even if only as an episode in the middle of the story. But it was fun entertainment in the Haggard adventure tradition, as much worth reading as watching a movie.



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Review: The Giant and How He Humbugged America

The Giant and How He Humbugged America by Jim Murphy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Inspired by the Bernie Madoff scheme, Murphy decided to write something about hoaxes in general. The basic underpinning is that people believe what they really want to believe, and that a compelling narrative often beats out rational and empirical evidence. I enjoyed each phase in the Cardiff Giant's travels through the entertainment world, including erstwhile Mormon sensationalist. The fact that there was a general buzz in the country, a desire for some story like this giant, tells something about the emerging mass media and information ages. This story made me feel like the people of the US were hungry for mass media long before it arrived, and that hoaxes like this were a bit easier to perpetrate because they were good entertainment. Newspapers were already in play, but live entertainment was still central, and this kind of sensational find was interesting.

Murphy made interesting choices of visuals, including the few photos he could gather of the stone behemoth itself. What is impressive are the full source notes, which lead to primary and contemporary secondary sources. This book is in the top ranks for sourcing, and because the hoax topic is broad and conceptual instead of linked directly to only this featured example, it is a book that cannot be replaced easily by a simple trip to wikipedia. It would be a good introduction to a wider inquiry on deception. Becky Terhune, graphic designer, made some excellent choices in fonts, page layout, and color scheme.



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Review: Wild Horse Scientists

Wild Horse Scientists by Kay Frydenborg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Because this book features the work of specific scientists (Jay Kirkpatrick, Ron Keiper, and Allison Turner)--even discussing some of their specific experiments and field work--I sort of expected to see a reference to a paper or two by the scientists themselves. No dice! A range of secondary sources rules the day. The book talks about the scarcity of scientific studies on wild horses back in the 1970s, and clearly references a written proposal by Keiper. None of these authentic texts is featured in the book, and we don't find them in the sources.

I enjoyed the in-the-moment experience of the book, and was intrigued by the overarching narrative of how to manage the population with birth control drugs. I remember a similar initiative for mountain streams and beavers in Utah in the 1980s and 1990s that helped return mountain streams to more manageable flow patterns.

My son, Alma (13), stole the book from me when I brought it home and found several favorite pages to sit and look at for a long time. The photography is very good, with great variety across the book. There are probably just as many shots of the scientists both in the lab and at field work as there are great shots of these wild horses! A lot of interesting devices and help for navigating were provided in the graphic design, but no designer was given credit (too bad, because I enjoyed the work).



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Review: The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity

The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity by Elizabeth Rusch

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Because the mission was so heavy on photographs, it was interesting to look at all the images in one place. I've seen the odd image with a news story, but haven't looked at all of this visual information in one place. It was exciting to see the tracks where they accidentally discovered silica.

The story uses the narrative thread of how the team's estimates of the rovers' performance were always outshone. They spoke of the rovers anthropomorphically, but it was obvious that this was a way of celebrating or investing themselves in their work. The people involved most tightly in decision-making were presented as strong central characters alongside the rovers themselves.

Sources: Meticulously quote-sourced to interviews, blogs, and other primary sources. Twenty-five bibliographic references given for each of these. An update just before press time was added to tie up loose ends on the Spirit narrative. Rusch provided the link to her own web site and to the mars rover web site, where updates and more information could be found. This is one of the best sourced books so far!



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Review: A Black Hole Is Not a Hole

A Black Hole Is Not a Hole by Carolyn Cinami Decristofano

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



So there's a clear trend in some of these complex topics toward the illustrated book, rather than the picturebook format. This is the former. Copious illustrations are fully complementary or corresponding to the text, with each picture intended to be an example of something discussed in the text. This is an interesting convention, because in 21st century literacy, we should be expecting to see the arrow turn the other way --shifting to the visual being the primary 'text' to read. It's more likely to see this in picturebooks--I'm thinking of Molly Bang's plankton book.

This book drew Pearl right in because of the title--it's very clever. She browsed in the book for a little bit and then we had some conversations. This was fun to see, because it confirmed what Kim Bontempo was teaching us about digital reading--that it encourages browsing behavior, moving around a text, not a linear read from start to end. I suspect that magazine reading style (in particular I think of National Geographic browsing), has a lot to do with the emerging formats of informational text. This book supports browsing but is still organized as a linear presentation.



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Review: Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95

Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95 by Phillip M. Hoose

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Another difficult review to write, because this book is a genre-breaker. Like Helfer's book about the lion, this one is really a biography but it's about an bird rather than a person. Hoose dedicates the careful attention to this individual bird we would expect from a biographer. At the same time, the book is jam-packed with all of the visual features and structure we have come to expect from exemplary informational text.

1. Sourcing. Eight pages of chapter by chapter notes in back matter; Annotated bibliography with 23 items on three pages, in categories.
2. Photos. They are at once compelling and relevant. These images are all about providing context for B95's journey. In a biography we are used to seeing all of these photos crammed into the middle plates, but because this is a hardcover informational text the information-text style was granted free rein to place the full color photos throughout the text. Brilliant!
3. Informational features. Captions, maps, diagrams, infographics, text vignettes in blue boxes, datelines in chapter headers, subsections when needed, profiles of key scientists as sections within chapters--everything that encourages browsing over cover to cover reading. (That's how I've been using this book over the past week.)
4. Text. Extremely reliable, and well-connected to specific scientists and research traditions. All woven into a compelling narrative packed with science identities, science processes, and science thinking. Just like we expect from good National Geographic format, there is plenty of text here--a lot of reading to do when I was done browsing. Yes, the info-text features lead me to browse, but also eventually to settle in for some longer focused reading.

Beyond all of the high-quality design (Roberta Pressel is credited in the front matter), the book gave me an interesting aesthetic 'in the moment' experience of following this bird across oceans and continents. In all, I'm surprised this book didn't win the 2013 Newbery.



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Review: Island: A Story of the Galápagos

Island: A Story of the Galápagos by Jason Chin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



The graphic design in this book was remarkable, and the palette drew me right in--amazing work on the cover! But the strength in this book is the back-and-forth between full page or full double-page pictures and the many small cameo cutout pictures Chin used on the other pages. This gave the book a graphic novel feel, but also felt like a documentary or a museum presentation. Each of the five chapters handles a major development in the geological history of the islands (in chunks of millions of years), and the interior of the chapter details life during that epoch. Endsheets are great--front endsheet gives a list of species, and the back one a map.

The back matter is informative, but does little to suggest I might encounter information about the Galapagos anywhere else outside this book. The consulting experts were featured clearly and the research was convincing, but I wondered what he had read. The compulsory back matter provided an overview of Darwin and a description of the islands' formation in a more didactic, less imaginative style. The back matter does very little that anyone couldn't do better by going online. In general, I was looking for more sourcing.



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Review: Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard

Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard by Loree Griffin Burns

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I'm willing to bet Burns originally pitched this as a 4-book series, like Serafini's 4-book Looking Closely series. Each chapter has several parts, each with a different approach to text--the imaginative, the didactic, the 'be the scientist', and an equipment checklist and picture-matching quiz. There's a lot of text, compared to the DK approach to info text, but Burns' writing is very good and I the balance of texts and visuals was fine for me. My 8-year-old daughter read several parts I asked her to look at and she was into it.

The first part of each chapter is written in a very nice read-aloud voice, and focuses on imagining doing the fieldwork. The didactic part presents the scientists' existing work and projects, and how and why data collection is going forward. Then it moved me into the role of scientist, showing me how I could do this kind of project.

The book accomplished just what it intended. I want to participate in two of the four projects (ladybug, and monarch). This book for me was a great example of having an aesthetic experience with persuasive writing.



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Review: Demolition

Demolition by Sally Sutton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I like this as an example of a concept book. Like Machines at Work by Byron Barton or Machines Go to Work in the City, by William Low--but this one just focuses on demolition. The one page of back matter describes in labeled diagram the specific tools used for the job in the story.

The text uses onomatopoeia for each rhyming presentation of a moment in a building demolition--although a lot of it is focused on salvage rather than demolition. Of course, it would be a salvage company doing the demolition. Lovelock's illustrations make regular use of the contrasting bright colors typical of heavy machinery and working clothes against the grays and blues in the background for the raw material of the demolition. It's an interesting book to look at, and worth another look close to see how his transparent technique works--not described in the front or end matter as many artists now do. My guess would be watered down gouache or acrylic--it doesn't look quite like watercolors but could be.

This text give me occasion, however, for a critique of the rhyming children's book. Rhyming as a device is supposed to make text more memorable. If this book were a frequent read-aloud between parent and child, I can see this being so for this book. As a library book, not so much--how many times would it get read? As a general convention in children's books it's very tired. The onomatopoeic rhymes for this one were somewhat unique and kudos to Sutton for maintaining good rhythm. I just wonder if like the books mentioned above, the machines and processes themselves aren't memorable on their own. Forget whether it's done well or not, the larger question remains: Why rhyme it? If it's on purpose, it had better match an aesthetic schema for the picturebook as art instead of just leaning on an old convention.



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Review: Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors

Golden Domes and Silver Lanterns: A Muslim Book of Colors by Hena Khan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Interesting genre issues here. The book is clearly intended to present an insider's definitions of Muslim concepts. The device of presenting each fact through a color has the feel of a nursery rhyme, but not any one in specific. Khan's sense of rhythm is convincing this way. Amini's illustrations are unique in style with a textured background for each image, and an airbrushed look as well as hints of collaged cloth and photography. But I think this is all computer drawn. I can't say exactly why, and the end sheets don't say anything about the art process. Text colors, placement, and font sizes all done by Amelia May Mack, graphic designer, emphasize each featured concept on each page.

Not knowing much about Islam, I wondered as I read the book about the question of presenting images of people. In particular, I remember reading about hotel and travel brochures for companies having all the people extracted from them for publication in Saudi Arabia. The aniconist principle in Islam is more widely interpreted than I thought, but when the wikipedia article started naming off examples of exceptions I recognized how it works. It's worth a look!



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Review: Just a Second

Just a Second by Steve Jenkins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



It is unusual to see an informational book about time. It makes me think there should be a kids' book about ontology -- consciousness and existence, Heidegger with concrete examples. The examples of time in this book were straightforward, but after a while it became clear that it was just a book about how many of certain things can happen in a unit of time. That got old. Also, there was clear text about how time developed as a measurement concept, but nowhere were these measurement concepts (such as minutes or seconds) presented visually in a diagram. Interesting fact about when and where seconds, minutes were developed. That part of the text is easy to find on wikipedia, so it's great that most of the visuals and time in the book are spent on points of comparison.



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Review: Barnum's Bones: How Barnum Brown Discovered the Most Famous Dinosaur in the World

Barnum's Bones: How Barnum Brown Discovered the Most Famous Dinosaur in the World by Tracey Fern

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Kulikov's illustrations show a cinematic talent for laying out the scenes using techniques like the odd camera angle and the montage. Visually this book is very interesting because of the variety of work he does with these techniques page to page.

Fern's story is engaging. She tells in her end notes which elements she had to fictionalize, and which came from sources. Between Fern, her editors, and the designer, they decided to put the outside sources on the very end sheet, pasted to the cover board--ingenious solution! This enabled her to provide the source for all the journal entries and letters she used as primary sources (and which are featured on the front end sheets). I started out rating this book a 3, but I think that solution alone brings some quality into the book that I value.



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Review: The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau

The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau by Michelle Markel

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



So while the words of this book are biographical, the illustrations are a clear presentation of Rousseau's style. Hall did a remarkable job of keeping consistent with this stylistic mimicry while inventing scenes that were her own.

Like so many modern artist biographies, this one emphasizes the narrative of 'artist persists despite critical rejection' (along with 'he died poor and not so famous'). I'm not sure what to make of that narrative today--why is it the accepted story of an artist's life?



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Review: The Equal Rights Amendment

The Equal Rights Amendment by Leeanne Gelletly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Winner! First person on goodreads to read this book. Is there some irony in the fact that I'm not a woman, and that I'm from Utah where they voted against ERA? (We were fed such propaganda: like that ERA would force everyone's mothers into the draft and send them to Vietnam. On page 43 the ratification map shows my area of the West in the same colors as the Deep South. Good company for civil rights.)

This book is piled deep with information, and Gelletly is family with one of the movement's founders which is a great recommendation for her personal investment in the test. This thick text does not shy away from lengthy descriptions of legislative process and piles of dates and names--yay! But it is one-stop shopping for someone doing research on the topic and needing basic answers. The book focused exclusively on the movement, and not on the cultural rhetoric that worked actively to justify the inequalities. That was a choice of focus, but also a shortcoming in terms of depth.

Copious source notes make it easy to trace quotations back to original sources. It would be nice if this extended beyond just the quoted material. Timeline, books for further study, and a handful of Internet resources round things out. Just by the good source notes alone, this book does what most info books should do in helping people go to the originals.

Does this book duplicate what anyone could find on the net? The wikipedia article is serious competition. This book wins by bulking up with relevant photos and cultural artifacts, but you could get to these quickly with google images or by following links within the wikipedia article, so maybe a draw?



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Review: Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why

Bird Talk: What Birds Are Saying and Why by Lita Judge

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Communication is a nice slice through a wide, wide topic. This was a good choice.I almost think Judge could have focused on one bird and gone for depth?--maybe she'll do a follow-up.

I noticed Judge did an interesting suspense thing early in the book, where she gave a teaser on one spread and then delivered on it at the page turn. But then this disappeared later in the book as it got more cramped with content.

I think I may have a hard time with the informational book review, because the approach seemed so basic. There is so much I've heard about bird communication research over the past ten years that I'm disappointed as a reader not to see it. So is the age orientation of informational text always going to get in the way of my aesthetic experience as an adult? I haven't needed to pretend to be a child, or project my experience onto children with story or poetry picturebooks thus far. If I have to do so with informational text, it's an indictment of the genre (or is it of me?).

I enjoyed the author note at the end. It qualified her not through her own science credentials, but because she grew up around ornithologists--both grandparents! Life experience and depth worked well for me. I also just enjoyed quickly reading each bird's techniques--while it was basic, I didn't already know the information for every bird.

Sources? None given. It could have been the Cornell ornithology lab with all its sound file--give us something!



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Review: The House That George Built

The House That George Built by Suzanne Slade

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



What makes this book interesting? First, Julia Bond's illustration style. I enjoyed her impressionistic 'just enough' drawings handle the human figures. She spends more effort on creating a scene, a composition. Transparent watercolors help her control the way my eyes move by keeping the darker areas on the page to a minimum--these guide the eyes to the lines of the composition instead of just to human figures.

Second, 'a slice'. Just the history of the construction of the White House, with 2-3 pages of back matter to extend the topic. The way the story dovetails with George Washington's life gives a hint of biography to the book, but not so much that it goes all the way there.

Third, Slade's use of the House Jack Built cumulative nursery rhyme was done extremely well. Slade's sense of prosody was right on, which can be the most difficult thing about using an existing pattern.

Sources: Slade acknowledges William Seale's personal communication in the front matter, and again for his books in the back matter. The resources to learn more section gives just enough. Slade leans heavily on Seale's work, and it would be nice to be led out to a few other sources beyond his whitehousehistory.org. Granted, this site is excellent for its use of primary sources and guidance on research--it may be the best portal Slade could have offered for extending research.

But what if people go to the Internet first (which is likely)? It feels like editors and authors of informational text are under the assumption that research will begin with their book and move outward. Very bibliocentric. What should a book be like if inquiry starts with a fairly thorough search of the internet, including the site she suggests, and thenmoves to a book? How can an informational book add an experience that would augment what happens with readers on the net? The question of correspondence, complementing, or contradicting text becomes fascinating when we consider a book as only part of a broader inquiry. To what extent does the book mirror what is already given in other sources, to what extent does its experience complement, and in what ways does it provide a contradictory or counterpoint narrative? My points 1 and 3 above argue for complementary, with a holistic experience I didn't find on the web.



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Review: Sneed B. Collard III's Most Fun Book Ever about Lizards

Sneed B. Collard III's Most Fun Book Ever about Lizards by Sneed B. Collard III

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Okay, so this is the first in a stack of informational books. It takes on a very wide topic--all lizards--which the author notes represents over half of all reptiles. So this photograph-oriented book is completely topical, and each 'chapter' (there's a TOC at the front)takes on an aspect of interest for the topic.

Collard provides copious text for each section of the book, in a joking voice that reminds me a little of Kratt's Kreatures from the 1990s on PBS (I guess they have a newer animated show on now). The jokes are frequently designed to anthropomorphize, which is often unacceptable to scientists reviewing children's books--but he clearly emphasizes that it's a joke to do so.

Most doubles in this book have a large captioned photograph to go with the topical text, and an unrelated fact in a small informational sidebar in yellow. The structure works well for National Geographic style reading--i.e., browsing the pictures first. The sidebars offer factual tidbits for a small amount of reading. This book should be very good for research on the topic because of how much text there is.

As an aesthetic experience, I felt like the photos were the strength of the book--I was interested in browsing around several times. The jokes in the text were often cheesy, and I didn't care for them.

For informational text, help me out Stacy, we do not let go of the fact that a picturebook is a piece of art and needs to be at the heart of an art transaction, an aesthetic experience. I'll try over the next few dozen books to focus on this aspect of informational books.

Collard doesn't offer background to convince us of science credentials, only his past books. His writing provides an everyday person's reading of lizards, not a scientist's reading. He has consulted scientists, vets, and others without clear citation, and spends a small section at the end on external sources for further reading. For the most part his treatment is self-referential, and does not do much to guide the reader's look at the topic outside the book.

BTW, Collard used a Spanish phrase that looks like he got it from Google translate. "Do lizards speak Spanish?" cannot be translated word for word as "Haga los lagartos hablan Espanol?" An editor should have checked this! Either 'Hablan los lagartos Espanol' or 'Se hablan los lagartos Espanol' would have been more correct.



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Review: Love You Forever

Love You Forever by Robert N. Munsch

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



So, so bad. So very, very bad.

The big ironic twist? The book must be purchased to use as a bad example. See Suzette Youngs for ideas!



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Review: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I shelved this dark not because of Oxenbury's treatment, but rather because Carroll's writing is rather dark in tone. He does it well.

Oxenbury's illustrations are just what we would expect--very good figure drawings in her signature style. She chose not to depart from the conventional illustration tradition for this book, and every single picture maps almost 100% onto words from the text. I've always hoped someone would do something a little more complementary or counterpointy at least with the Father William verses, and these were the most representational of all. However, I expect editors don't want illustrators to take something that was once radical, now traditional, and complicate it again. I'd have liked to be a fly on the wall for that meeting.

At any rate, they gave her full rein on the graphic design. Wonderful paper, great wide margins and gutters, comfortably large print and many double page illustrations in full color. What a great project for Oxenbury!



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Review: Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey

Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey by Mini Grey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I probably should have read the first installment in this series before this one. I spent the whole time wondering why he was called "traction" man.

I shelved this as a graphic novel, because there's a lot here that draws on the comics.

I looked for a long time at the end sheets before starting, and it really immersed me in the pop-culture advertised toys world. I enjoy the idea that the story starts from Traction Man's point of view instead of the boy's. This makes the imagined world more in the foreground. Grey does a lot to minimize my active participation in the boy's world, instead letting much of the action continue from the toy's point of view. I think this is a difficult trick to pull off.

Three stars? Not much of a plot to speak of. Toy and boy go to beach, dog loses doll, girl finds doll, boy finds girl and they play together. It's the pop culture jokes that keep things moving in this book!



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Review: Vivaldi's Four Seasons [With CD (Audio)]

Vivaldi's Four Seasons [With CD (Audio)] by Anna Harwell Celenza

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



The overall muted and restrained palette of Kitchel's illustrations made the colorful bits stand out. The flat style and strong outlines are reminiscent of some of Tomie DePaola's work. The girls' red dresses, the imaginative spring are some of the colorful bits that pop from the washed browns and grays. Because it focuses on only a slice of Vivaldi's life, the book has room to focus on the relationship between the composer and the young women in the orphanage where he used to direct music. A fictionalized narrative for how this all played out was interesting, but made me wonder if the letters and mailings were made up.

No sources were given, which makes this book less reliable. Why did they choose that route? Celenza obviously did her research. Were there primary sources? Missing sources make the book less useful as biography or history.



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Review: Those Darn Squirrels Fly South

Those Darn Squirrels Fly South by Adam Rubin

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I didn't read the first book in this series, so I was a little surprised by the sudden turn in vocabulary about ten pages in. I thought the illustrations were just going to be kind of minimalist and otherworldly, but then 'floogle birds' and 'farfle seeds'. It just wasn't needed.

There are some funny gags in here (Santa Vaca, 12 miles per hour, etc.). Not much of a plot: The squirrels head south with the birds, they phone the guy, the guy comes, then they all go home. Is that a spoiler? Rubin & Salmieri go for the comedy all in the characterization and the straight man / comic setup.



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Review: Zita the Spacegirl

Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was a lot of fun. The tone and characters reminded me of Jeff Smith's Bone series, and the setup for an ongoing ensemble of characters was great to set this up as its own series. Pearl devoured it before I got a chance to read it, and she loved it. Science fiction, main character is a girl, she rescues a boy--great package for sci-fi! My favorite scene was when she got to really go all out with the stomping boots.



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Review: Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane's Musical Journey

Spirit Seeker: John Coltrane's Musical Journey by Gary Golio

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



It was Gutierrez' manic fauvre illustration that made this book move--my son sat and looked at pp 32-33 for a long time. The pictures prompted me to get online and listen to something new. I looked at the Expression album, and the music is just wildly abstract--"Offering" and "To Be".

The text delivered a fairly straight biography, with an unwavering line toward Coltrane's religious enlightenment. That was what Golio chose as the story to tell. He chose to do the full life from childhood up. Hm. This story may have worked better as a 'slice' out of the larger life, as so many biographers are doing, so he could have gone for depth in exploring why and how.

Golio was absolutely un-shy about the difficult content of alcohol and drug abuse, which was admirable. But at the same time the straightforward explanations of why a person turns to drugs sounded a little like advice. I give Golio the benefit of the doubt. I'd rather have a book bring up issues like this for people to discuss--and this text is built more for a read-aloud than for a kid to sit down alone.



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Review: Mice

Mice by Rose Fyleman

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Giving Fyleman's 1932 poem a punch line in the illustration was a really fun idea--a moment for inference! As each page progressed, I found I was more intrigued in looking closely at Ehlert's technique. This isn't supposed to be what happens when we look at art, but by the time I looked at her saltine cracker and bag of Cheerios I was hooked on looking at this. Her technique is far looser and rough around the edges than I was expecting.

Eating the Alphabet was one of our favorite alphabet books when Bela was little in the 1990s--and that was much tighter in illustration style. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that I like this book, when I clearly dislikeEric Carle's 'you could do this yourself' style. I find it condescending to children. This book not so bad that way. The fun postmodern turn is that Ehlert illustrates the mice along with a variety of the art supplies, office supplies, and household junk she uses to make the book!



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Review: Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building

Dreaming Up: A Celebration of Building by Christy Hale

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



It was an interesting idea to have kids building with materials that felt similar to those in the architectural photos. But the rhyming text and illustrations felt like a mismatch to the strong informational photos. The poems were all arranged graphically to try to mimic the building materials, too. The assumption that rhyming text makes a good children's book is faulty and in this case distracting. In fact, I would have preferred photos of kids building with these materials over the illustrations.



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Review: Twelve Kinds of Ice

Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This was rare for me. I was so sucked into the nostalgia of this book, that I felt like I had to read some of the reviews on goodreads before writing my own. Usually I don't check in like that before writing, because I like to write based on my aesthetic response. The best thing I found by reading the reviews was the category term 'memoir'. But Lu Benke's use of the term 'mood book' also seems applicable--I was focused clearly on one topic, and the characters, events, and details around this topic all worked to give me a 'feel' for what ice means to some people. You can tell the editors in charge of this book thought they had an award winner--they spared no expense in special size of book, design, cover, etc.

Overall, I would categorize this book as a genre-breaker. It clearly has informational elements to it, giving a culturally embedded informational look at ice--from the point of view of a Northeastern US family, but easily applicable to the culture in many provinces in Canada or the northern Midwest US. It clearly has some autobiographical elements in it, but the story is fictionalized and exaggerated (not by grand hyperbole, but by concentration and focus). Lu says it's categorized solidly in fiction on WorldCat. The book also has the same kind of curious seasonal structure we might remember from Sendak's Chicken Soup, with Rice. One of my favorite details, however, was how Obed so intentionally avoided using months and days in the earliest parts of the book. This gave me the feel that the ice was truly the marker of time, not the calendar. Then as the ice disappeared, the calendar came back into prominence.

McClintock's illustrations are charming as all get out. Pauline Baynes is who immediately came to mind, but Robert McCloskey was close behind (actually, after discussing it with Nancy, McCloskey isn't quite right--these illustrations have a much more imaginative vein rather than the realism of McCloskey). The double-page spreads are wonders of the crisp drawing style that was such a hallmark of the magazine illustrations and commercial art of the 1920s-1960s. I enjoy looking at that kind of skilled drawing.

All that said, this book is totally white bread. And the appeal to nostalgia probably isn't the best recommendation for a book to get top honors, even if the awards are only annual. What this book does in structure is SO similar to what I experienced while reading Jimmy the Greatest! And Jimmy did so much more to knock me into a different world (making the strange familiar and the familiar strange) that I think it's far superior. I enjoyed both, and found myself asking my family and friends to look at both.



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