Round the Garden - Hardcover

Omri Glaser

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810941376 ISBN 13: 9780810941373

Publisher: Harry N. Abrams, 2000

Synopsis

Traces the journey of a tear as it falls to the ground, evaporates, reappears as rain, and waters a garden to make an onion grow to produce more tears.

About this title

Review

In an unusual mix of fiction and science--no, it's not science fiction--8-year-old author Omri Glaser traces the hydrologic cycle that starts with a tear. The falling tear helps form a puddle, which evaporates to become a cloud, which makes the rain fall, which helps the garden grow, which produces an onion, which causes more tears! Color-soaked pages hold simple, sparse text in easy-to-read bold print; the story should be lingered over and used as a starting point for discussions about earth science, nature, and life cycles. The illustrations, created by the artist team of Byron Glaser and Sandra Higashi, are digitally produced: two-page spreads of solid color and minimal artwork alternate with more elaborate spreads depicting broad stretches of sky, ponds, and gardens. Clouds are labeled with their correct categorizations (cumulus, nimbostratus, cirrus, etc.), and a very loose diagram of photosynthesis, again with proper terminology (carbon dioxide, soil, oxygen, sunshine) is a good introduction to this phenomenon, without bogging down in age-inappropriate specifics. The youthful age of the author can serve as an inspiration to would-be writers and illustrators. (Ages 3 to 7) --Emilie Coulter

From Publishers Weekly

Asked to write a Japanese box poem in his first grade class, Byron Glaser's son, Omri (now eight years old), conceived a brief musing on the cycles of nature. When a tear provoked by a bee sting falls from a child's eye to the ground, it evaporates in the sun's heat, becomes part of a cloud "that made the rain fall" and gives nourishment to a vegetable garden where onions grow. Completing the cycle, the onions, when eaten, "made the gardeners cry" tears of pride and joy. The senior Glaser and Higashi (whose design firm also created the Zolo and Bonz toys) riff on this one-sentence text with boldly hued, digitally created full-bleed illustrations. Pages facing the text feature a single iconic image (the text reading "that watered the garden," for instance, faces a slick image of a tomato on a field of pure turquoise); these alternate with double-page nature panoramas with a soup?on of didacticism (e.g., each type of cloud in a pink and orange sky is carefully labeled). More often than not, the eye simply skates across the shiny surfaces; ultimately, this is a junior version of a coffee-table book. Ages 3-7. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0810941376
• ISBN 13: 9780810941373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 34