Overview
Splitter, splat, splash! While they sleep, the forest fills with the sounds of the night creatures. Sloop! A silky anteater slurps up thousands of ants. Flap flap! A bat bites a fig. Hssss. A snake thrusts its tongue to taste the air. The air carries the taste of mouse. Everywhere night creatures with huge bright eyes slither and slurp through the darkness.
Come explore the rain forest!
A downpour wakes the creatures of the rain forest. Howler monkeys roar and drink the water that drips from nearby leaves. Birds with rainbow beaks fly in search of shelter. A poison dart frog finds a tiny pool where her tadpoles can grow. In a place that gets twenty feet of rain a year, it is a way of life.
Vibrant, colorful collages and an inviting text take young readers on an exhilarating tour of the tropical rain forest.
Takes a journey through a rain forest, investigating the plants and animals that dwell there.
Synopsis
Splitter, splat, splash! While they sleep, the forest fills with the sounds of the night creatures. Sloop! A silky anteater slurps up thousands of ants. Flap flap! A bat bites a fig. Hssss. A snake thrusts its tongue to taste the air. The air carries the taste of mouse. Everywhere night creatures with huge bright eyes slither and slurp through the darkness.
Come explore the rain forest!
A downpour wakes the creatures of the rain forest. Howler monkeys roar and drink the water that drips from nearby leaves. Birds with rainbow beaks fly in search of shelter. A poison dart frog finds a tiny pool where her tadpoles can grow. In a place that gets twenty feet of rain a year, it is a way of life.
Vibrant, colorful collages and an inviting text take young readers on an exhilarating tour of the tropical rain forest.
Publishers Weekly
Jenkins's collages also shine in Rain, Rain, Rain Forest by Brenda Z. Guiberson, illus. by Steve Jenkins, particularly the thin, nearly transparent strips of paper used to intimate rain. The attractive volume transports readers into the steamy, humid depths of a habitat where ticks and moths live in the fur of a sloth and azteca ants and aphids work in tandem, devouring tree trunks for nourishment. A scientist arrives late in the account, seeking undiscovered creatures and curatives. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Vivid, engrossing slice of life."—Kirkus Reviews"The attractive volume transports readers into the steamy, humid depths of a habitat where ticks and moths live in the fur of a sloth and azteca ants and aphids work in tandem, devouring tree trunks for nourishment."—Publishers Weekly
"Vibrant words and sensory impressions bring the creatures' noisy cacophony and slithering, swooping motions up close, while gracefully incorporated facts convey a surprising amount of information about basic survival."—Booklist, starred review
"The present-tense narrative offers action-packed and animal-crammed descriptions of the residents' doings, livened up by onomatopoeic exclamations that evoke the sounds of the teeming biosystem. The muted greens and gray-blues of the cut-and-torn-paper collages recall the damp, dim warmth of the downpour under the canopy, and the positioning of focal points in foreground and background space deepens each prospect and highlights luxurious textural details."—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"Both Guiberson's text and Jenkin's pictures are similarly packed with detail, capturing the relationships among plants, animals, and the environment that support and sustain life."—Horn Book
"This eye-catching picture book transports readers to a tropical rain forest. . . .Effective use of onomatopoeia further enhances the narrative with forest sounds. Jenkins uses his signature collage style to bring this realm alive for viewers."—School Library Journal
"Guiberson's nicely paced test is packed with information. . . . Jenkins' colorful and informative collage illustrations are a perfect compliment to the text."—Scripps-Howard syndication
Publishers Weekly
Jenkins's collages also shine in Rain, Rain, Rain Forest by Brenda Z. Guiberson, illus. by Steve Jenkins, particularly the thin, nearly transparent strips of paper used to intimate rain. The attractive volume transports readers into the steamy, humid depths of a habitat where ticks and moths live in the fur of a sloth and azteca ants and aphids work in tandem, devouring tree trunks for nourishment. A scientist arrives late in the account, seeking undiscovered creatures and curatives. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.Children's Literature
Using plenty of lush description and onomatopoeic words—such as kwak, crrik, crriks,drip-drips, sloops—Cuiberson conveys a typical day or two in rainforest life. The text covers a fair amount of territory. There is flora such as bromeliads, orchids with roots hanging in the air, moss, and mangoes. There is fauna. A sloth weaves the narrative together as it slowly makes its weekly way to the tree bottom to go to the bathroom, and then slowly makes its way back up the tree again. Capuchin monkeys groom each other in comfort after a harpy eagle carries one off for food. Johnson's signature collage illustrations are, as usual, a marvel of cutting, textures, patterns, and tints. But this medium of necessity cannot work in details that make a young reader totally believe in the information at hand. For instance, a bromeliad is rendered as cut ovals over which a watery oval is pasted down—but the look is definitely not pool-like in the sense of a true bromeliad. While the text mentions orchids with swollen bulbs in which water is stored, the illustrations depict a six-foot-long iguana nibbling an orchid leaf but no bulbs. The text tells readers that a poison-dart frog carries a tadpole baby up the tree on her back in order to deposit it in the bromeliad pool. How? No picture shows us. The sloth's face looks friendly without necessarily looking real. For children who are familiar with some part of the rainforest, this book provides a pleasant and in-depth look at an ecosystem with enough specifics to send others off to the encyclopedia to further investigate. But the illustrations are at odds with the informational text. While this picture storybook gives the reader plenty ofrainforest information, no glossary, index, or labels support the learner so this hybrid may fall between the cracks in the curriculum. 2004, Henry Holt, Ages 7 to 10.—Susan Hepler, Ph.D.