maidmarianlib's review
3.0
Interesting set up for the information by framing it with a girl reading a book. Solid information.
readaloud_mom's review
adventurous
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.75
The illustrations of this book show a child being transported to the Belize Reef via a magical book. (I had initially read this as a flight of imagination, but my child has pointed out that the character appears wet when she returns to the library, so maybe it's intended to be more straight-up fantasy.) The protagonist this time is a white girl. (With a short haircut that is perhaps not entirely gender-conforming!) At the end of the book, she collects her interracial friend group around the magic book and the whole crew takes off swimming!
Typical for Jason Chin, the text doesn't refer to the fantasy at all, and instead narrates a lot of facts about coral reefs and the creatures that live there. I was less impressed by this text than I am by some of Jason Chin's later works, but I did like the slightly off-beat focus on interdependent relationships between different creatures in this "city of the sea".
Typical for Jason Chin, the text doesn't refer to the fantasy at all, and instead narrates a lot of facts about coral reefs and the creatures that live there. I was less impressed by this text than I am by some of Jason Chin's later works, but I did like the slightly off-beat focus on interdependent relationships between different creatures in this "city of the sea".
cweichel's review
4.0
This book is set up like Chin's Redwoods. In this one a young girl in a library begins to read a book about coral reefs and ends up transported into one. The book is full of information about the different kinds of coral and the many animals that make their home on the reefs. The back matter contains additional information about how coral reefs are threatened, and detailed information about the symbiotic partnership between coral and algae. I also appreciate the author's note where he writes about the research he went through and provides a list of books and websites he used.
literacydocent's review
4.0
Just as he did with Redwoods, Jason Chin combines nonfiction text about a specific location with beautiful illustrations. I appreciate that his characters always "enter" the location, in this text the coral reef, through the reading of an actual book. He illustrates the idea that reading "can take you places" brilliantly.
kyndal's review
informative
slow-paced
2.0
This book reads like a text book. Its saving grace is the extraordinary art.
brucefarrar's review
5.0
In a large library, a girl plucks a book titled Coral Reefs off the shelf. As she begins to read, she also begins to imagine. And as she does, the library starts to transform itself into the reef. Chin has painted a beautiful watercolor imaginary background for his text, turning an introduction about the biology of choral polyps, predator and prey, food chains, and the ecology of the coral reefs, lagoons, and the ocean written on a tenth grade reading level into a picture book that portrays the power of the human imagination to transform the hard facts from the printed page into a mental facsimile of the thing itself, and share the experience with others.
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