Review of Overview: A New Way of Seeing Earth, by Benjamin Grant with Sandra Markle

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Overview

A New Way of Seeing Earth

Young Explorer’s Edition

by Benjamin Grant
with Sandra Markle

Crown Books for Young Readers, 2019. 150 pages.
Starred Review
Review written 02/20/2020, from a library book

This book reminds me of The Earth from Above, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand, which I read and reviewed back in 2004. This is the same idea: photos of earth taken from above. But in the previous book, I believe the photos were taken by airplane. These are taken by satellite – but a satellite that can zoom in or out and still get detailed shots.

This book is packaged for children, with a text upper elementary kids can understand. The focus is the photos, so the text isn’t long, but does give some food for thought.

This book was revised by children’s nonfiction author Sandra Markle from a longer book for adults called Overview, and that book was based on an Instagram page showing satellite pictures.

There’s a foreword by retired astronaut Scott Kelly, where he explains how it can affect you to look at Earth from space:

From space, Earth looks like a peaceful place, without political borders. From orbit, astronauts get the sense that this is how Earth was meant to be viewed. This vantage point gives you a sense of oneness, an awareness that we are all part of the same humanity. Many people call this the Overview Effect, which is where this book gets its name. When astronauts experience the Overview Effect, we feel a greater connection to Earth, its people, and the environment that changes us forever.

The pictures in this book are stunning and amazing. Many of them are beautiful. With both manmade beauty and natural beauty. Many are disturbing – particularly ones of bright red polluted bodies of water. But this is a book you’ll enjoy looking at over and over again.

dailyoverview.com
rhcbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/overview.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Girl on a Motorcycle, by Amy Novesky, illustrated by Julie Morstad

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Girl on a Motorcycle

by Amy Novesky
illustrated by Julie Morstad

Viking, 2020. 48 pages.
Review written October 6, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

Girl on a Motorcycle is a beautifully illustrated picture book telling the true story of Anne-France Dautheville, a French girl who rode a motorcycle around the world in 1973.

Julie Morstad’s illustrations have a retro feel, but they also give a feeling of adventure, wonder, and beauty. The girl on the motorcycle is small, but she’s determined.

The book shows the many different places she traveled and the many different people she met along the way. It tells about times when she needed help from strangers and other times when she simply enjoyed the company of strangers.

And it captures the feeling of seeing amazing things and collecting amazing experiences.

The text part (before the Author’s Note) closes with a quote from Anne-France:

The world is beautiful. The world is good.

When she closes her eyes, the girl can still hear the road.
Elsewhere is just a little bit farther.

This book leaves you ready to listen to the call of the road. I wonder if any children reading it will end up as world travelers.

penguin.com/kids

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/girl_on_a_motorcycle.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Superpower Field Guide: Moles, by Rachel Poliquin, illustrated by Nicholas John Frith

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Superpower Field Guide

Moles

by Rachel Poliquin
illustrated by Nicholas John Frith

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 96 pages.
Review written April 2, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#4 General Children’s Nonfiction

I checked out this book thinking it would work well for booktalking in the schools. I was absolutely right, but now that schools are closed I’m going to have to wait another year to do it. So let me tell you about it.

I never dreamed a book about moles could be so entertaining! This author uses a conversational tone and really emphasizes the Wow factor of many strange characteristics of moles. One way she does this is by describing nine mole superpowers: Astonishing Architect of Dirt, Indefatigable Paws of Power, Double-Thumb-Digging Dominance, Arms of Hercules, Super-Squidgibility, Early Whisker Warning System, Headless Hoarding, Saliva of Death (Maybe?), and Blood of the Gods.

She describes moles in ways you can understand, such as shaped like a potato. And gives scientific terms more vivid names. The prepollex is given the name Weird Fake Thumb, or WFT for short. Scientists say that moles’ blood has high oxygen affinity. This author says they have the Blood of the Gods.

Here’s an example of the writing style in this book, taken from the beginning, after she’s explained that moles are shaped like a potato:

Now, potato-shapeliness is definitely too dowdy to be a superpower. But believe it or not, it’s a MOLE’S SECRET WEAPON.

Let me explain.

Scientists say moles and potatoes have cylindrical bodies. Cylindrical is a fancy way of saying “shaped like a tube.” But if you look at a potato, you’ll notice it is not shaped like a tube so much as shaped to fit inside a tube. And that is the important thing about potato-shapeliness – it helps moles fit in tubes. A giraffe would not fit in a tube. Neither would a poodle, nor a chicken, nor any other animal with long legs and a long, bendy neck. Big floppy ears would also not be good in a tube. Take it from me, if you’re going to live in a tube, it’s best to be shaped like a potato.

Of course, moles don’t live in any sort of tube. They live in underground tunnels. And not just any underground tunnel. Moles are MASTERMINDS OF UNDERGROUND EXCAVATION! They are ASTONISHING ARCHITECTS OF DIRT! They are TUNNELING TORPEDOES! Which brings me to ROSALIE’S FIRST SUPERPOWER.

The cartoon illustrations also fit the tone perfectly.

So there you have it – I now know about the wonders of moles. I read an entire book about moles and enjoyed every moment of it. Who knew science could be so much fun?

rachelpoliquin.com
nicholasjohnfrith.com
hmhco.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/moles.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Imaginaries, by Emily Winfield Martin

Art, Children's Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

The Imaginaries

Little Scraps of Larger Stories

by Emily Winfield Martin

Random House, 2020. 80 pages.
Review written July 11, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

This book is a worthy addition to the tradition of The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg. What you have are a set of fantastical paintings, each with a scrap of text, with the text usually shown as actually written on a scrap of paper.

The caption that goes with the picture that appears on the front cover is “Lily wanted to be a good place to land.”

One of my favorites shows a monkey holding a key and says, “Ask the monkey what he knows.” It’s written on the back of an envelope.

There’s a picture of five children wearing dresses at the edge of a forest, and they have the heads of animals. The caption says, “Their parents never knew the secret.”

A few characters seem to appear in more than one picture.

A note at the front from the author says that she found these scraps of words and pictures over the years, “illustrations for stories that do not exist,” in various places.

I found one in a lighthouse, one in a packet of seeds, one in the trunk of a hollow tree.

There was one tucked in the corner of a forgotten diorama, one hidden like a pearl in an oyster shell . . . one forgotten in a paperback from a used bookstore in Paris.

These pictures will send your imagination circling as you browse them, and may provide seeds for all kinds of stories.

A wonderful offering.

rhcbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/imaginaries.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Sounds All Around, by Dr. James Chapman

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

Sounds All Around

A Guide to Onomatopoeias Around the World

by Dr. James Chapman

Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2020. 165 pages.
Review written November 13, 2020, from a book sent by the publisher
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#3 General Children’s Nonfiction

Here’s what it says on the page at the front of this book:

Let’s Make Some Noise

Learning the sounds animals make is an essential part of language learning. Spending hours and hours pretending you’re a chicken or a dog is not only great fun, it’s educational, too. If you grew up speaking English, you probably already know your woofs and meows from your clucks and quacks – but how does the rest of the world describe sounds?

[This next part has cartoon animals.]
In Japanese, cats don’t go MEOW. “NYAN!”
In German, pigs don’t go OINK. “GRUNZ!”
In Hindi, frogs don’t go RIBBIT. “TARR!”

There’s a whole world of words for all the sounds you know and love! (And even some words for sounds that don’t show up in English.)

The words that imitate sounds are known as “onomatopoeia.” These words are a wonderfully strange and interesting part of language. After all, we hear the same sounds, but we interpret and write them differently in different languages.

If you sing “Old McDonald Had a Farm” in French, your farmyard ducks go “coin coin” instead of “quack quack,” and in Russian they go “krya krya.” From the sound of a speeding car, to the sound a dog makes, to the sound of rain, there are almost as many words for these sounds as there are languages!

The format of this book is chapters of types of sounds with spreads looking at one certain type of sound in multiple languages. It’s in graphic novel format, so we see the sounds in speech bubbles coming from cartoon animals or characters or things. The chapters are “Animal Noises,” “On the Farm,” “In the Zoo,” “Loud Noises,” “Natural Noises,” “Noisy Machines,” “Sounds of the Human Body,” and “Sounds of Emotion.”

We learn fascinating things, such as “Kusukusu” being the Japanese word for “Ha Ha” and “Tagaktak” being the Filipino word for “Splat” and “Vzheeh” being how Russians say “Zoom.” It’s all mind-expanding to think about the many different languages, but also mind-expanding to realize how many different words we have in our own language for sounds.

This isn’t a book that fits neatly into a curriculum anywhere. You couldn’t use it to learn a language. But it’s super fun to read and to think about. This is a book that could easily capture a child’s imagination. I know it captured mine.

The one little thing that I wish it had is a pronunciation guide, since I know in some languages, English letters don’t make the same sounds. Though perhaps they left that out because once they started, it would have gotten tricky with so many languages used. This keeps it light and fun, but still informative.

andrewsmcmeel.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/sounds_all_around.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity, by Amy Alznauer, illustrated by Daniel Miyares

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity

A Tale of the Genius Ramanujan

by Amy Alznauer
illustrated by Daniel Miyares

Candlewick Press, 2020. 48 pages.
Review written July 11, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#3 Nonfiction Picture Books

The Boy Who Dreamed of Infinity is a longer-than-usual picture book biography of the mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. The book focuses on his growing-up years with his constant thinking about mathematical ideas and passion for it that couldn’t be contained.

Here’s how the author talks about the young Ramanujan’s thoughts:

What else is small? Ramanujan wondered. He remembered the legend of the single egg that cracked open to reveal the entire universe. He thought about a mango.

A mango is like an egg. It is just one thing. But if I chop it in two, then chop the half in two, and keep on chopping, I get ore and more bits, on and on, endlessly, to an infinity I could never reach. Yet when I put them back together, I still have just one mango.

He loved this idea, small and big, each inside the other. If he could crack the number 1 open and find infinity, what secrets would he discover inside other numbers? It felt like he was setting out on a grand chase.

Numbers were everywhere. In the squares of light pricking his thatched roof. In the gods dancing on the temple tower. In the clouds that formed and re-formed in the sky. Every day he wrote numbers in the sand, on his slate, on slips of paper, his slender fingers flying, each number a new catch.

The book tells about Ramanujan’s life in India before he finally got an answer from the mathematician G. H. Hardy and was invited to England. It captures his obsession with numbers and his difficulty in doing other things. His parents tried him in a new school every year, because he didn’t fit into the molds they wanted. Eventually he failed college because all he would think about was math.

I love that the author is also a mathematician, and I think she does a great job expressing Ramanujan’s genius, overflowing ideas, and desire to be heard. The artist paints wonderful illustrations to go with the text, showing us an imaginative boy dreaming about numbers and living in a land with lots of sunshine.

The book ends as Ramanujan travels to England:

As he rocked on the steamer and gazed up at the great night sky, so full of stars that it looked like a glittering infinity, he never could have guessed that someday scientists would use his ideas to help explore that sky and that his work would change the course of mathematics forever. One hundred years later, people would still search his notebooks in wonderment, trying to discover what he was thinking.

candlewick.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/boy_who_dreamed_of_infinity.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Almost American Girl, by Robin Ha

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Graphic Memoir, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Almost American Girl

by Robin Ha

Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins), 2020. 233 pages.
Review written May 13, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#4 Longer Children’s Nonfiction

The graphic format is so wonderful for a memoir about dealing with middle school and high school under exceptionally trying circumstances. I hope this will enjoy the popularity of similar books such as Smile, Best Friends, and New Kid.

When Chuna Ha’s mother brought her to America one summer, Chuna thought they were just taking a vacation. They went to Alabama, a place Chuna had never heard of, and stayed with a “friend” of her mother. At the end of the “vacation,” her mother said she was getting married and they were in America to stay.

Chuna took the American name of Robin, but it was hard to pronounce. She didn’t speak English very well and had a lot of trouble in middle school in Alabama. We see Robin having trouble getting along with her step family, bullies teasing her cruelly at school, and how hard it is to make friends when you don’t speak the same language. She finally meets kids she connects with when her mother finds a comics class at a comics store.

She and her mother move to Virginia when she’s ready to start high school, and then there’s an entire classroom full of English Language Learners, so she no longer feels so out of place, and doesn’t stand out. At the end of the book, Robin visits her hometown in Korea and sees her old friends and learns that not only is she different from them now, she has different hopes and dreams for her future.

This graphic-format memoir brings you into Robin’s experiences with all its struggles and triumphs.

banchancomic.tumblr.com
epicreads.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/almost_american_girl.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of The Fabled Life of Aesop, by Ian Lendler, illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Folk Tales, Starred Review 0

The Fabled Life of Aesop

by Ian Lendler
illustrated by Pamela Zagarenski

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 64 pages.
Review written March 24, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-outs:
#2 Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books

This is a collection of Aesop’s fables that stands out for two important reasons.

The first outstanding thing about it is the stunning illustrations by Caldecott-Honor-winning artist Pamela Zagarenski. Every page of this book is beautiful to look at. The illustrations feel otherworldly, adding to the universal nature of the fables.

The second outstanding feature is that the author presents the life of Aesop before and after presenting most of the fables. I knew, I think, that Aesop had been a slave, but very little else. Ian Lendler tells about his different owners and how he won his freedom with his wisdom.

He also explains why fables were important for slaves – a way to tell the truth indirectly and thus not get into trouble. He imagines situations for Aesop to tell several of his fables in the story of his life, thus avoiding trouble while sharing wisdom. I like that the author clearly shows – with one of Aesop’s fables – that freedom was the greatest treasure he could win.

There’s an author’s note at the back that explains what we know and don’t know about Aesop. But that the idea of a slave who won his freedom with his wisdom was attached to the fables for more than 2,000 years.

This book gave me a whole new appreciation for these fables that I’ve heard over and over again. Children being introduced to them this way will find them magical.

ianlendler.com
pzagarenski.com
hmhbooks.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/fabled_life_of_aesop.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Create Your Own Secret Language, by David J. Peterson

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

Create Your Own Secret Language

Invent Codes, Ciphers, Hidden Messages, and More

by David J. Peterson
illustrations by Ryan Goldsberry

Odd Dot, 2020. 144 pages.
Review written November 28, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

I’ve always liked books about codes, ciphers, and cryptography. In fact, I made a video series for kids this summer while the library was closed about using mathematical concepts to make ciphers.

This book shows us many kinds of codes and ciphers (though not the same ones I used), but takes things a few steps further, showing kids not only how to encode English, but even how to create their own secret language.

It starts as many books on codes do, with letter substitution codes and historical ciphers. But this one goes further by telling you how to design your own glyphs and a whole new writing system. Why should you be confined to the English alphabet?

This all culminates in a section at the back on designing an entire language. It begins by looking at the sounds you may want to use in your language and how they’ll be put together in syllables and word forms. Then it goes on to look at different parts of speech and the ways they vary in English. For example, nouns have singular and plural forms. How do you want your language to do that? English verbs have different forms for singular and plural and ways to show different tenses. Then there are adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns. And you might even want to make related nouns with similar root forms.

That sounds complicated – but this author makes it seem simple, with lots of worksheet space in the book to play with your ideas. (Buy a copy so you aren’t tempted to write in the library book!)

It turns out the author has done this himself, having invented languages for various films and series, including Game of Thrones. Who better to play with these ideas than kids? And they’re going to learn a lot about how language works while they’re at it.

odddot.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/create_your_own_secret_language.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?

Review of Honeybee, by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

Honeybee

The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera

by Candace Fleming and Eric Rohmann

Neal Porter Books (Holiday House), 2020. 36 pages.
Starred Review
Review written February 8, 2020, from a library book
2020 Sonderbooks Stand-out:
#1 Children’s Nonfiction Picture Books

As soon as I read this book, I knew which book I hope wins the 2021 Caldecott Medal.

When I was a child, I had a book from Disney publications that included a chapter on bees with lots of close-up photos. I hated that part of the book and didn’t even want to turn the pages for fear I’d touch the pictures of the bees.

I must have outgrown my squeamishness, because this book is full of oversize close-up paintings of bees, and I think the book is beautiful. Perhaps it’s the fact that they’re paintings instead of photos – Eric Rohmann has made the bee featured here look positively plush and cuddly, while still being completely scientifically accurate.

I learned so much I didn’t know about bees when reading this book. I knew that worker bees have jobs in the hive. But I didn’t know that the same bee gets different jobs as it ages. This book highlights the different jobs a bee goes through. After the bee has emerged from a cell in the honeycomb, here are a couple of early pages:

Crawling to a cell packed with sticky, rich pollen,
Apis eats.
And eats.
And eats some more.
Her wings dry. Her color darkens to a warm yellow orange. Her muscles grow strong.

Strong enough for flying?

Not yet . . . cleaning comes first.
Apis’s first job is to tidy the hive’s nursery.
She hauls away leftover bits,
carts off old wax caps,
leaves each cell ready for a new bee egg.
When she turns three days old, special glands behind her face swell and expand.
Soon she is ready for her next job.

Flying?

No, Apis doesn’t fly yet. First, we see her do the jobs of nursing, queen tending, comb building, food handling, and guarding.

When she finally flies, on the twenty-fifth day of her life, Apis gets a beautiful fold-out section in the middle of the book featuring a wide-open sky.

We do of course learn how she gathers nectar and carries pollen and dances to tell other bees about her finds.

The book goes all the way to our heroine’s death and then comes full circle with a new honeybee coming out of its cell in the hive.

This is another book for which I can’t do the striking pictures justice. I didn’t even think I liked to read books about bees, but I was captivated by this beautiful book. The writing, too, is wonderful. With each job, the writer builds suspense, asking if Apis is finally ready to fly.

Go check this out and see for yourself!

HolidayHouse.com

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/honeybee.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

What did you think of this book?