Connie and Bonnie's Birthday Blastoff - Hardcover

Grade 2-4-A wayward invitation lands in the hands of human twins, and they're off in their cardboard spaceship to a party on Pluto. Along the way, they pass the moon, the planets, comets, and asteroids; readers so inclined can stop off for quick fact snacks that include day and year lengths, average distances from the sun, general composition, and unique features. As the children, bulb-nosed cartoon figures in gaudy colors, contrast startlingly with the more realistically rendered planets, so too does the fictional plot seem superimposed on a conventional nonfiction tour of the solar system. Arced, overlapping frames; arrays of insets; and text printed in rays, spirals, and other hard-to-read shapes give the pages a frenetic look. Despite some minor bobbles-nebulae is used indiscriminately as singular and plural, and galaxies are hardly "...the largest forms in the universe"-the authors offer just the right amount of hard fact for the target audience-but they try too frantically to grab readers' attention.?John Peters, New York Public Library
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.