Fire

School Library Journal

Gr 4-6This final book in Robbins's quartet on the elements (Water [1994], Earth, and Air [both 1995, all Holt]) is unique in that it celebrates a process rather than a substance. Lavish with the delicately hand-tinted photographs that are Robbins's hallmark, the brief, conversational, and often rhyming text explores fire in its many forms. From lightning ("...stark and jagged patterns") to fireworks ("...just as in wartime, only nobody dies"), the author reflects on the usefulness, beauty, and danger of combustion. Like the other titles, this is not a book for avid amassers of pertinent facts for reports, though it could flesh out a skeletal bibliography. It is, rather, for those young readers who find personal satisfaction in thinking about things, and who delight in discovering a writer with a similar bent for musing and making connections.Patricia Manning, Eastchester Public Library, NY

Susan Dove Lempke

In the fourth and final volume of his series on the elements, Robbins takes on fire, the element that's different from the others, which are substances; fire is "a process, an action, a thing that occurs." He ruminates on the various forms of fire, extending it from the explosion at the beginning of the universe to electric lights, coming up with some interesting ideas and connections, though they are not always elegantly phrased: "We set a fire to sustain the ecology that used to be before people were around to interfere." As in the previous works, Robbins has hand-tinted his photographs, a technique that works less effectively here because the varying colors of fire hold part of its interest, and the tinting prevents our seeing the real fire. However, each photograph is in itself a work of art, carefully composed and nicely hand-labeled.