A Day in the Deep

November 1, 2013

Gr 2-4-Donald examines fossilized footprints and attempts to put them in perspective for a younger crowd. She does this through rhymed stanzas that are often forced and campy. Helpful facts and explanations are buried within the text. The dinosaurs are colorful and even feathered, yet the text references fictional Jurassic Park, "where dinos come to life?/The raptors shown there are certain to scare, /with claws sharp as a knife," then refers to their claws as "tappity." Kurtz uses a similar jumpy rhyme to explore marine life. While Molly Bang and Penny Chisholm's Ocean Sunlight (Scholastic, 2012) and Erich Hoyt's Weird Sea Creatures (Firefly, 2013) use both photographs and illustrations to illuminate the bizarre world deep below the surface, Kurtz's book feels dark and murky. Further, much of the illustration is lost in the gutter; most notably, an anglerfish is reduced to tail, lure, and gaping maw. This book touches on some fantastic topics like whale fall, marine snow, bioluminescence, and bacterial involvement at many depths, but it never gives facts with any complexity. The back matter attempts to fill in the holes left in the spare rhymed texts, but it is too small and verbose for early science readers.-Leila Sterman, Montana State University Library, Bozeman

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2013
Grades K-3 Life exists from the ocean's surface all the way down to its dark floor. Descending in five-hundred-foot increments, the author and illustrator look at life in five deep-ocean habitats. At each level, aquatic life adapts to diminishing light. With surface light, brown algae abounds. Dive lower and find out-of-this-world sea creatures, such as sharks with glowing bellies, viperfish with antennae that flash, headlight fish with luminous blue lights, spookfish with totally clear skin, and angelfish that use parasitic bacteria as lights. With each descent, the illustrations become darker and more muted. Double-page spreads are captivating, although the folds do fall across some pertinent body parts. While brief rhyming verses describe the animals, four pages of more in-depth information about the ocean creatures end the book. This would make for a fine complement to informational books with photographs of ocean life.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2014
Well organized by successively deeper ocean layers, from sunlight to hadal zone, this book introduces representative marine creatures as well as their survival features (headlights on anglerfish to attract prey) and behavior (vampire squid spraying glowing mucus to enable escape). The generally accurate text attempts to rhyme, with halting results; the illustrations are flat and static. Activity pages are appended.

(Copyright 2014 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)