Skip to main content

The Humblebee Hunter

By curlyq
The Humblebee Hunter
by Deborah Hopkinson; illustrated by Jen Corace
Disney Hyperion Books, 2010. Unpaged. Picture book.

Little Etty can't wait to go outside to help her father study bees--that is a much more interesting pastime than baking indoors on a beautiful, sunny day! The children are delighted and excited to discover how many flowers a bee can pollinate in a minute. As Etty and her siblings observe the bees and their pollination patterns, their father, Charles Darwin, teaches them about the process of scientific theorizing.

This is a lovely picture book that humanizes a well-known figure, Charles Darwin. Many people probably don't consider him having an ordinary, day-to-day life as a father and husband, but this book beautifully portrays it and gives him another face than just the Father of Evolution. I also appreciated it showing what joy can be found in the process of learning and discovering. The illustrations are lovely, especially in the palette used, making vivid images with closeups of the bees and the children's excited faces. All together, this is a great book to introduce a famous man to young children.

In this lovely book about the Charles Darwin and his family, we are allowed a glimpse into the more human side of a brilliant man that people often think of as more of an theory than a person. As his children help him study the garden bees, learning about pollination, they are also growing closer together as a family. This is a wonderful tribute to an amazing man.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Blood in the Water

By
Blood in the Water By Tiffany D. Jackson New York: Scholastic, 2025. Fiction. 255 pages. 12-year-old Kaylani McKinnon can't help but feel like a fish out of water. She's a Brooklyn girl spending her summer on Martha's Vineyard surrounded by wealthy family friends in their mansion. All she really wants is to stay home all summer where she her incarcerated father can easily reach her, and she can keep working to find ways to prove him innocent of fraud and embezzlement. Despite her protests, she finds herself on the island with the snooty granddaughters of her host. Soon after Kaylani's arrival, a popular teen boy is found murdered and she decides to conduct her own investigation. As she tries to discover what happened to Chadwick Cooper, Kaylani finds that not everything on Martha's Vineyard is as perfect as it appears. Thrillers for middle grade readers can be hard to find, but Tiffany D. Jackson succeeds in her first middle grade novel. A quick moving plot, tight d...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more