Thank You, Earth: A Love Letter to Our Planet. By April Pulley Sayre.
Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $17.99.
Olga #2: We’re Out of Here! By Elise Gravel. Harper.
$12.99.
Gorgeous photographs that highlight the
many beauties and wonders of our planet are the central reason for being of
April Pulley Sayre’s Thank You, Earth,
a simply written book intended to remind readers how many everyday things in
the world are extraordinarily beautiful if we only take the time to look at and
appreciate them. When described, the pictures do not seem particularly unusual:
a spider’s web, a sandpiper on the beach, some clouds, a bit of seaweed,
mountains, trees, and creatures ranging from a ladybug to a sloth to birds and
squirrels and turtles. But Sayre’s careful selection of photos, her thoughtful
sequencing of them, and the delicacy with which she decorates the pictures with
just a few apt words, make Thank You,
Earth very special. “Thank you for sounds” goes with a close-up view of a
yellow warbler with beak open. “For struggles” has a squirrel straining upward
on a branch of pussywillows in search of some treat or other. “Thank you for
rays and radials” juxtaposes an extreme close-up of a purple coneflower on
which a bee is perched with an almost equally close view of dandelion fluff.
“Thank you for those that crawl” includes a strange-looking red mangrove root
crab and a gorgeously colored black swallowtail caterpillar. And while many
photos here are super-close looks at things, others are very broad views:
“Thank you for sunsets” covers two pages and shows spectacular sky colors in
Arizona’s Phoenix Sonoran Preserve. The concluding sentiment, “Thank you for
being our home,” simply and beautiful sums up all that has gone before, all the
plants and animals and day scenes and night scenes and all the aspects of
nature that make Earth and the lives on it so special. Interestingly, Sayre
completely omits human beings and human creations from this “love letter,”
implying in so doing that the beauties of Earth are strictly those that do not include
or involve people – an omission that can open the door to discussions with
young readers about the world they live in and how it intersects with and may
often displace the loveliness of the world shown by the photos Sayre has
selected from multiple sources and the words she has chosen to go with the
pictures.
Among the words on the cover of Elise
Gravel’s second book about a girl named Olga are “Ciao, Earth!” Young readers
may wonder why anyone would want to get away from all the gorgeousness in
Sayre’s book. Well, that is not really what Olga wants: she is something of a
grump, and she simply wants to get away from people. OK, not all people – just most of them. And she wants to
take Meh with her on a journey to Meh’s planet. If Meh comes from a planet
other than Earth. Meh, you see, is a somewhat piglike, pink and fuzzy creature
of unknown provenance, discovered in a trash can by Olga in the first Olga
book, whose delightfully offbeat title is Olga
and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere. Olga is a budding scientist as well as a
misanthrope, and the first book mostly involved her trying to figure out what
Meh could be and deciding that there is no way to know, so Meh must be a new
species, Olgamus ridiculus. Gravel’s
idea in these books – in which the
pictures and text are equally important even though the works are not exactly
graphic novels, being more of a hybrid form – is to include some factual material
along with the usual exploration-and-discovery-and-friendship stuff that is
common in books for preteens. The mixture worked better in the first book than
it does in the second, where the science is brought in somewhat heavy-handedly
and repeatedly threatens to hijack the story and turn it (horrors) educational. Olga is considerably
happier and more involved with human beings here than in the first book, even
though the start of We’re Out of Here!
is about her determination to get away from our home planet. As in the first
book, Olga likes to wear the same sack-like dress all the time and does not
like to wear socks or shoes – a fact that Gravel forgets at one crucial point,
when Olga (who narrates the book) says, “I put my shoes on and ran, still wearing
my pajamas,” but the picture clearly shows Olga barefoot, as usual. Anyway, the
plot here starts with Olga looking into ways to explore space, then involves
her investigating reports of alien beings or creatures coming to Earth, and
eventually works its way around to the main point – which has to do with Meh
(so called from the noise she usually makes) behaving strangely and smelling
worse than usual and needing to go to a veterinarian. The vet, Dr. Spiffle, is
a showoff obsessed with his Internet presence, but he does manage to give Olga
some useful information: apparently this budding scientist never thought to
measure Meh’s length or height, for example, but Dr. Spiffle does so. The best
part of the book is the eventual discovery of why Olga’s appearance and
behavior have been a bit “off,” and that discovery very definitely opens the
door for future books in the series. So despite the second book’s title, readers
can expect to be seeing more of Olga and Meh right here on Earth, hopefully
having adventures in which the blend of amusement and information is handled as
entertainingly but a bit more seamlessly than it is in We’re Out of Here!
No comments:
Post a Comment