Review_CHILDREN’S
62 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ MARCH 9, 2020
Review_CHILDREN’S
Alba and the Ocean Cleanup
Lara Hawthorne. Big Picture, $16.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-5362-1044-6
Appealing hopefulness infuses the implausible tale of Alba,
an orange fish who lives in a reef where “shimmering fish darted
and dived, and strange creatures scuttled into hidden places.”
She loves to collect things, but over time, “Alba found fewer
beautiful objects... and slowly, more trash started to appear.”
Hawthorne’s clean-edged watercolor and gouache illustrations
conjure the dismal fate of the dazzling reef—a four-panel
spread shows the trash piling up and the color leaching away.
When Alba spots a pearl in a plastic bottle, she is trapped
trying to retrieve it. After rescuing Alba, a girl named Kaia
tells everyone in her community “how dangerous their plastic
and trash were making the oceans.” The town cleans up the
mess over the course of a single page turn, even installing
wind turbines, and Kaia returns home to a recovering reef.
Closing spreads identify animals in the reef and ways to take
care of the ocean, but the book’s simplistic, speedy approach
to cleanup may not impress upon readers the scale of the
actions needed. Ages 3–7. (Mar.)Green Machine: The Slightly Gross Truth About
Turning Your Food Scraps into Green Energy
Rebecca Donnelly, illus. by Christophe Jacques. Holt/Godwin,
$17.99 (32p) ISBN 978-1-250-30406-3
Confusing text choices weaken this rhyming introduction
to green energy, which follows food “from the farm to the
town, to the market, the kitchen, the plate,” into the compost
pile, and off to the processing plant. In Jacques’s retro-mod
cartoon illustrations, a green truck (“Call it Peels on Wheels or
a truck full of yuck”) collects materials from green recycling
bins, taking them to a large stinky tank “where trash becomes
gas” and large, goggle-eyed microbes peer out from their
“slow, murky work.” Unfortunately, the text zips by complex
ideas, such as anaerobic digestion and biogas, without initial
explanation, and the lines seem to favor cadence over clarity
(“It’s airtight in there, no O 2 for these bugs,/ tiny microbes
that eat food plus poop”), which may prove perplexing to
readers not already in the know. An illustrated diagram at
the end clarifies the process, and endnotes make the case for
green energy and belatedly explain anaerobic digestion.
Ages 4–8. (Mar.)One Earth
Eileen Spinelli, illus. by Rogério Coelho. WorthyKids, $17.99 (32p)
ISBN 978-1-5460-1539-0
A helping-hands concept and fantastical illustrations
elevate rhyming text in this earnest ecological counting book.
Beginning with “One wide, sweeping sky./ Two honeybees,” it
counts up through bunnies, redwood trees, seagulls, and wormsto “ten fields to plow.” Then, at 10, it pivots: “Celebrating
Earth—/ counting backwards now.” From 10 to one, the
text describes Earth-friendly actions of varying relevance to
young readers, some unclear (“Six flannel shirts—too old?/
Cozier than new”), others actionable (“Five lamps to light a
room?/ Try to use just two”), and some aspirational (“Four
pairs of socks with holes?/ You can learn to sew”). A series of
“ones” ends the book: “One moon.// One sun./ One Earth/ so
beautiful.// Remember—/ only one.” As the text conveys the
preciousness of a single Earth, Coelho’s illustrations portray
it with soft, pencil-like texture. Ages 4–8. (Mar.)Solar Story: How One Community Lives Alongside
the World’s Biggest Solar Plant
Allan Drummond. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $18.99 (40p) ISBN 978-
0-374-30899-5
Rural Ghassate, Morocco—“in the top left-hand corner of
the map of Africa” between the Atlas Mountains and the
Sahara Desert—has a mighty neighbor: the Noor power plant,
the largest “concentrated solar power plant in the world.” In
kinetic, loose-lined illustrations
washed with sunbaked hues, a group of
classmates explores and explains topics
including solar power, sustainability,
and community development. The
class visit to the plant frames statistics
useful to young readers—it is “the size
of 3,500 soccer fields, and contains 660,000 mirrors”—
while lengthy sidebars dive into deeper discussions of
Morocco, the plant, and its multidimensional impacts on
sustainability. Drummond’s author’s note relates that he
visited a school in Ghassate, which sparked the idea for this
framing and, despite his initial “cultural shortsightedness”
about the plant’s placement (“not... in a highly developed
country like the United States”), taught him that “solutions...
can be found everywhere and require a global perspective.”
Ages 4–8. (Mar.)Earth Hour: A Lights-Out Event for Our Planet
Nanette Heffernan, illus. by Bao Luu. Charlesbridge, $16.99 (32p)
ISBN 978-1-58089-942-0
For Earth Hour, people turn out the lights “on a Saturday
night, at 8:30 sharp, near the equinox in March” as a “pledge
to live more sustainably and conserve energy.” In the first
half of this picture book introduction to Earth Hour, Heffernan
describes the many ways that people use energy worldwide,
from warming homes to cooking dumpling soup, accompa-
nied by Luu’s crisp, cartoony illustrations, which incorpo-
rate world landmarks (the Sydney Opera House and Giza
Necropolis), assorted landscapes, and people of varying skinClean and Green
Informative picture books offer an ecologically conscious message.