While Mom works the night shift at NASA, Dad helps an intrepid girl get ready for sleep as she imagines she's exploring Mars.
Brianna Caplan Sayres is a former elementary school teacher who has
written several books for children including the Where Do series,
including Where Do Diggers Sleep at Night? and Where Do Steam
Trains Sleep at Night? She and her husband have two sons.
Ryan O'Rourke has a talent for drawing machinery for young
children. He has illustrated picture books about trains (Alphabet
Trains), trucks (Alphabet Trucks), boats (Alphabet Boats),
skyscrapers (Up! Up! Up! Skyscraper), and spacecraft (Eight Days
Gone), as well as many other topics. He is both author and
illustrator of Bella Lost and Found and Bella Up, Up, and Away.
www.ryanorourke.com
A child with eyes on the skies fits an envisioned trip to Mars into
the bedtime routine.
After Mom has gone off to work a night shift at (as a later video
call reveals) Mission Control, Dad flies the space-mad young
narrator upstairs to wash up, snuggle down, and all the while
imagine traveling with the Curiosity rover through space to land on
Mars. In his russet-toned illustrations, O’Rourke bucks a common
trend in the recent spate of entry-level tributes by not
anthropomorphizing the durable rover. Consequently, the episode is
animated less by artificial, fanciful elements than by the child’s
native interest in space. The child’s astronomical enthusiasm is
underscored in the pictures as the scene switches back and forth
from Mars to good-night hugs and kisses in a bedroom festooned with
space-themed furnishings and decorations. If Sayres’ verses aren’t
exactly star quality (“We cuddle with my bedtime book… / We’re
racing toward the sand. / Our parachute helps slow us down. / It’s
time for us to land”) and the illustrator varies the child’s size
from scene to scene, still the premise has a certain glow to it…and
both rhymed part and prose afterword shed glimmers of background
information about the rover’s mission. Child and parents appear to
be White, but there are figures with darker skin in a crowd
scene.
It’s nice to see a vivid imagination at work even though this plods
where it should soar.
—Kirkus Reviews
After her mother leaves for work as a NASA engineer, a young girl
is readied for bedtime by her father. As they go through their
nightly ritual of playtime, bath time, and story time, the young
girl imagines herself on a space mission that mimics the one of the
real-life Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012. This story
is told through a series of quatrains in which the second and
fourth lines rhyme. For the most part, the text chugs along nicely
with a clear, if imperfect rhythm. However, a few awkward lines in
the middle trip up the tongue and halt the gentle motion that
propels the rest of the story. A wide range of color palettes is
employed, from the soft sky blues and yellows of daytime, to the
oranges and reds of a dusty Mars, to the dark purples and midnight
blues of night here on Earth. Illustrations pair well with the
text. For instance, when the girl is carried by her father up the
stairs, she imagines being on a rocket soaring through the vast
darkness of outer space. Smart use of white space shows us how the
father’s care and stories give his little girl’s imagination room
to grow. The title itself has a double meaning: It is the name of
the real-life Mars rover the young girl imagines, and also the
quality our young protagonist exhibits that will allow her to grow
into a NASA engineer like her mother. Seeing a young girl
foregrounded in a story about STEM is always inspiring; however,
all of the approximately 20 people are light-skinned. VERDICT
Despite this 21st-century space story’s lack of diversity, it is
still a touching celebration of curiosity.
—School Library Journal
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
