From School Library Journal
Kindergarten-Grade 3—Fisher takes techniques from video and digital media to explain a scientific concept. The book opens on the stage of a cooking show whose hosts, Snow White, Jack Frost, and a snowman named Chef Kelvin, use the cooking metaphor to teach the audience how snow is made. Snippets of text appear, recipe fashion, on each spread and deconstruct the processes of evaporation, deposition, application of heat (or cold), and precipitation. The visually dynamic, digitally created art features lettering that helps tell the story. For example, the word "water" spills from a measuring cup and looks, well, wet. Fisher includes collage, dialogue asides, arrows, onomatopoeic descriptors, and fact boxes, yet maintains clarity, cohesion, and purpose.
Snow Show will be a hit with teachers who need to get a point across and with youngsters who are used to the visual stimulus of a screen.—
Lisa Egly Lehmuller, St. Patrick's Catholic School, Charlotte, NC Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
The text is informative—it defines evaporation, deposition, the conditions that produce specific crystal types—and amusing. The asides are more amusing still, but what sets this book apart is its art. It's one of the most gloriously exuberant, inventive displays of computer-created art that I have seen in a picture book. (
The New York Times - Paul O. Zelinsky )
