Looking Down (Turtleback School & Library Binding Edition)

PreSchool-Grade 3-The Earth floats in space, a small blue marble, growing with each turn of the page. The North American continent swells until the streets of a (fictional) coastal town become visible, then a particular neighborhood; a dot on the sidewalk becomes a boy with a magnifying glass, viewing-what? A ladybug fills the last page. Using neat, sharp-edged paper collages and pure, simple colors, Jenkins convincingly conveys, better than most aerial photography, both a sense of height and an almost vertiginous feeling of movement in this wordless fall. Books with expanding rather than contracting scales, such as Istvan Banyai's Zoom (Viking, 1995) or the Hirsts' My Place in Space (Orchard, 1990) end on more cosmic notes, but younger readers will find this an exciting, eye-opening slide.
John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.