Copyright Date:
2024
Edition Date:
2024
Release Date:
03/19/24
Illustrator:
Le, Khoa,
Pages:
1 volume (unpaged)
ISBN:
1-536-22451-0
ISBN 13:
978-1-536-22451-1
Dewey:
811
LCCN:
2023944085
Dimensions:
27 cm
Language:
English
Reviews:
School Library Journal
(Mon Apr 01 00:00:00 CDT 2024)
Gr 4–6— "Can you ever really see the wind?" "Can you ever really know the wind?" Two short questions and poetic suggestions toward the beginning of this book invite readers to personally experience wind. "Lift your face to the breeze—/ let it bathe your cheeks/ sift through your hair/ tease your fingertips./ Listen/ while the wind whispers its name." This fanciful idea of the whisper leads directly to the "Bull's-Eye Squall," a poem about the squall blowing off the coast of South Africa. The winding tour goes on through 13 more places around the world where specially named winds blow across land, water, mountains, cities, deserts, and snowy expanses. Stops include Japan, the Pennine Mountain Range in Northern England, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Windy City of Chicago. Short lines of poetry, mostly blank verse, flow down picture book pages to terse explanations. Simple, digitally created scenes often include children, sometimes with a local animal. Softly shaded sweeps of sky and curving lines swirling everywhere show the wind's direction. End materials add brief comments on air in motion making the wind, the local naming of wind, and local poetic traditions used in a few poems. Geographic locations of the listed winds are shown as numbers on a circular globe, and there's a glossary and short bibliography of related children's books. The picture book format suggests a younger audience, but children in the middle grades will likely not be familiar with all of the named locations or readily grasp the fairly technical explanations. Some poems read aloud could spark classroom discussion and lead to further study of the ever-growing presence of wind. VERDICT Put this book of poems in the hands of talented science teachers.— Margaret Bush
Bibliography Index/Note:
Includes bibliographical references.
From Antarctica’s biting katabatic gusts to Hawai‘i’s sweet-smelling moani, discover fourteen winds of the world through poetry, scientific facts, and transporting illustrations.
Lift your face to the breeze—
let it bathe your cheeks
sift through your hair
tease your fingertips.
In a dynamic collection of poems, Melanie Crowder and Megan Benedict explore the world’s winds, from Italy’s swaggering maestro to Libya’s fierce ghibli to Canada’s howling squamish. The poetic styles used reflect the characteristics and sometimes the location of each wind: Japan’s blustery oroshi is celebrated in haiku, for example, while the poem about Britain’s helm uses iambs in a nod toward the iambic pentameter of English sonnets. Sidebars relay the science behind how each wind forms, where it blows, and the weather systems it heralds, and the airy art from award-winning illustrator Khoa Le is overlaid with scientifically accurate wind lines that show the path of each gust. More meteorological details can be found in the back matter, which includes explorations of the origin of wind and how winds are named, a world map pinning the winds’ locations, a glossary, and books for further reading.