Breathtaking illustrations whisk readers away to Mars, but off-target text crashes on impact. Parents be warned: there are no babysitters for children marooned in the Martian desert.
Ho, Richard. Red Rover: Curiosity on Mars. Illus. Katherine Roy. New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2019. Print.
Genre
nonfiction picture book
Summary
NASA’s Curiosity rover prowls across Mars, gathering data. What can it teach us about the universe and the destiny of life on Earth?
Critique
Has illustrator Katherine Roy been to the Moki Dugway in Utah? Has she flooded her weekends with jaunts to the red rock desert landscapes collaring the Colorado, Green, and Yampa Rivers? Judging by her stunning illustrations of the Red Planet (Mars), I strongly suspect that she and I have toured the same spice-painted vistas.
Spread after spread, she gifts viewers breathtaking panoramas that mix creams, browns, and reds. Cinnamon, cocoa, paprika, chili turmeric, curry – Mars (like the desert southwest) is a feast for the eyes and soul! A mighty trifold spread at the center of the book showcases her fabulous artistry. With the left and right folds closed, readers see a close-up of the Mars rover, Curiosity, scanning the horizon. When the flaps are opened, readers sit in the rover’s tread tracks and look upon the massive red world.
Gazing. Sighing. Gazing some more. Little else is needed to relish this book.
Is it a wordless picture book, you ask?
Well, no. But maybe it should have been because what text (other than excerpts from Ellen Meloy or Edward Abbey) could hold its own amidst these sweeping illustrations? Author Richard Ho makes his best and bravest attempt.
The results are not always stellar.
By way of a sample, let’s look at the following:
“The little rover likes to roam. It is curious. Maybe it is thirsty.”
The sentences are short and simple. Ideal content for young readers. Nothing stylistically fancy or grammatically complex. The vocabulary also feels apropos; nothing too daunting or erudite. Just your average run-of-the-mill third person, right?
Wrong. Just after that humongous trifold spread, the text smacks readers with an equally humongous shift into first person!
“They call me Mars. I am not like your world.”
Wai-wai-wai-wait! You mean to tell me that this whole time The Planet Mars has been narrating this story about the rover??
But this is such a fascinating character. Seems a shame to introduce it so near the end of the book. Also, the surprise revelation opens the floodgates for many questions. Mars knows about Earth (our world)? How? And how does it know so much about the rover’s mission? Who told it? And if Mars knows about the mission and Earth, then how come it doesn’t know that the rover isn’t thirsty? How come it doesn’t grasp the rover is not a living creature? Wouldn’t a planet that once supported life know the difference? Has it forgotten? Or is a planet that is technically billions of years old actually “young” or “childlike” within the grander expanse of the 14-billion-year-old cosmos?
It’s just as well, because the main text ends only a couple pages later. Readers are more or less marooned. Although there is a back matter section covering three full page spreads, this informational, hard-data does little to help with a rescue mission.
For instance, a detailed diagram of the Curiosity rover seems impressive at first glance with all those fancy, technical acronyms: DRT, CHIMRA, SAM, REMS…etc. Unfortunately, even when the abbreviations are spelled out, they aren’t explained. How does it help a young reader to know that this or that component deals with “X-ray diffraction” if “X-ray diffraction” isn’t explained?
There’s also a page-long article about the rover and its mission, but wow the vocabulary here is at such a high level. For example, readers find out the various rovers have made “countless invaluable observations,” but do such gigantic words mean anything to early readers? Add to their challenges the length of Ho’s sentences. In one paragraph the word counts per sentence are as follows: 15, 12, 19, 28, 33, 10, 15, 32, 19, 29, 7, and 16.
Holy potatoes! I thought we were writing for readers who can handle, “The little rover likes to roam.”
It’s possible this back matter was designed for parents or teachers to enjoy; though that begs the question: why not have Ho write a book or article just for them and leave a kids’ book to be enjoyed by…well…kids? Why work so hard to drive the young readers through a gorgeous Martian landscape only to abandon them there with all the wrong questions and no way home?
Comments