Overview
Focuses on the land, animals, plants, and climate of Alaska, presenting it as an example of a place where it is so cold your hair can freeze and break off.
Focuses on the land, animals, plants, and climate of Alaska, presenting it as an example of a place where it is so cold your hair can freeze and break off.
Synopsis
Focuses on the land, animals, plants, and climate of Alaska, presenting it as an example of a place where it is so cold your hair can freeze and break off.
Publishers Weekly
These inaugural titles of the Imagine Living Here series offer a colorful display of facts designed to pique readers' interests. In the first title, author and illustrator visit the Sonoran Desert in Arizona to show how various plants, animals and people have adapted to the heat and aridity. An explanation of how Phoenix was established offers historical facts alongside natural science. Cold shows how people and beasts survive ferocious cold, and includes discussions on the tundra and permafrost, and on how animals such as polar bears keep their wet fur from freezing. Oddly enough, there are more people depicted in this second work, although that may not indicate that one region is more populous than the other. One design element makes the work less accessible: the long, information-packed paragraphs look dense. Lavallee's buoyant watercolors are generally pleasant, but she depicts each face, desert cowboy's or Eskimo's, as half-light and half-dark. That seems like an artistic conceit, and may confuse issues of race rather than negate them. Ages 7-9. (Mar.)