From School Library Journal
Gr 3-6-Large, clear, informative photos draw readers into this look at attempts to save the endangered Kemp's ridley turtle. Beginning with a 10-year-old boy who finds a nearly dead turtle during his patrol on a Cape Cod beach on a cold November day, Lasky details the efforts of a team of veterinarians, marine biologists, and volunteers to save the life of this turtle and others. The action moves from the New England Aquarium to the Florida Keys to the beaches of Rancho Nuevo, Mexico (with a map to show the way). The writing is so clear and the story so compelling that one almost passes over the beautiful imagery: "the sand is hard and sleek," "the salt water combs over them." This is also beautiful bookmaking, with a crisp layout and interesting font on oversized pages. Although researchers will learn a lot about the Kemp's ridley turtle, this is primarily an ecological adventure book to be read cover to cover. Pair it with one of many fine books on the sea turtle, including Gail Gibbons's Sea Turtles (Holiday, 1995) or Brenda Guiberson's Into the Sea (Holt, 1996). To look at rescue efforts for other sea animals, try Peggy Thomas's inspiring Marine Mammal Preservation (21st Century, 2000).-Ellen Heath, Orchard School, Ridgewood, NJ
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Gr. 3-6. There's a sense of wonder in the simple words and the huge, thrilling color pictures in this photo-essay about a vanishing species, the Kemp's ridley turtle. The astonishing, true nature story begins with one injured juvenile sea turtle and its rescue; then the book moves out to the general facts about the endangered animal: its life cycle; the hazards, natural and human, it faces; and the miracle of its survival through an active international effort. A young boy, Max, and his mother find the two-or-three-year-old turtle washed up on a beach in Cape Cod. Hatched from an egg laid on a beach in the Gulf of Mexico, it has been swept off its course, its journey interrupted. Is it alive or dead? They take it to the New England Aquarium where vets and volunteers place it in Intensive Care. Then five months later it's flown to the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys, where it's tagged (so it can be tracked) and released again into the ocean. As in
Monarchs (1993), Lasky and photographer Christopher Knight show the miracle of the small creatures that survive solitary from birth: "There is no one to teach them anything. They live alone and they live by instinct." The beautiful photos include close-ups of one turtle and the people caring for it as well as dazzling panoramas of its ocean path. The climax is the release, the thrill of seeing it swim free, the hope that that it will live to lay its own eggs on the beach where it hatched.
Hazel RochmanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
