Fire

School Library Journal

PreS-Gr 1 This short book is certainly not notable for its text. The four sentences which make up the story tell what color fire is (``. . .red, very red . . .and orange and yellow. . .and blue and white and black''), that it can be both bad and good and that it is used for things such as cooking and launching rockets. The illustrations, however, are quite lovely, and the bright colors will definitely be appealing to a preschool audience. The wet watercolor pictures of fire are almost as mesmerizing as the real thing. Two pages at the end of the book are written for adults to help them answer children's questions about fire. While the concepts discussed (combustion, geothermal energy, conductors and insulators) would be above the level of most preschoolers if covered in any detail, adults may wish to introduce some of these terms to children. This book differs from other books on fire, such as Gail Gibbon's Fire! Fire! (Crowell, 1984), because it deals with the concept of fire, not firefighting or fire safety. Phyllis Sue Alpert, Miami-Dade Public Library