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Summary
Summary
Early morning and a ruffle of feathers,
A shadow gliding through the backyard.
High above your house Father Hawk circles, sharp eyes searching for prey. From the front porch, you watch.
Swoosh!
He dives after chipmunks, crows, sparrows, squirrels.
Screech!
The sun sets low in the sky.
What's for dinner?
A father red-tailed hawk hunts prey for his family in a suburban neighborhood in this thrilling, fierce, and gorgeous nonfiction picture book, Hawk Rising , illustrated by Caldecott medalist Brian Floca.
Author Notes
Maria Gianferrari 's favorite pastime is searching for perching red-tailed hawks while driving down the highway. When she's not driving, she's watching Cornell Hawk mates, Big Red and Ezra, raise their chicks each year via birdcam. She's the author of Coyote Moon and Hello Goodbye Dog , also published by Roaring Brook Press. Maria lives in Virginia with her scientist husband, artist daughter, and rescue dog, Becca.
Brian Floca is the author and illustrator of numerous award-winning books for young readers, including Locomotive , winner of the Caldecott Medal and a New York Times bestseller, Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11, and Lightship, each a Robert F. Sibert Honor book. He is illustrator of many more books, including Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan's Ballet for Martha: Making Appalachian Spring , also a Sibert Honor book, Avi's Poppy Stories series, and Princess Cora and the Crocodile , by Laura Amy Schlitz. Brian was born and raised in Temple, Texas, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The spare, poetic prose of Gianferrari (Hello Goodbye Dog) joins the realistic watercolors of Floca (Princess Cora and the Crocodile) to present a day in the life of a red-tailed hawk. "Hooked beak, sharp as a knife./ Head turning./ Eyes searching./ Chicks waiting." Muted hues illustrate moments from Father Hawk's day as he scans for prey, sunbathes, dives after a chipmunk and sparrows, and finally snags a squirrel to bring back to the nest. All this plays out under the scrutinizing eyes of two young bird-watchers: a girl and her younger sister in a suburban neighborhood, who use binoculars to follow the progress of the feathered hunter. The second-person narration draws parallels between the girls and the hawk, as it also invites readers to imagine themselves in the scenes: "Chicks waiting./ You watching." Painted from varying angles, dynamic spreads and vignettes present the shifting perspectives of bird-watcher, hawk, and prey. The clever pacing and placement of text match the bird's actions across, up, and down the page. This captivating introduction to the red-tailed hawk concludes with more than a half-dozen facts about the common bird of prey and further reading. Ages 4-8. Agent: Ammi-Joan Paquette, Erin Murphy Literary Agency. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Horn Book Review
A red-tailed hawk hunts as his chicks wait in a nearby cedar tree and two human children observe from their house and backyard. Flocas illustrations in a classic ink and watercolor style accompany Gianferraris sensory, poetic text, setting the suburban scene and offering a dynamic, naturalistic depiction of the fierce predator and its behavior. As Father Hawk glides up, down, and around and has several failed hunting attempts throughout the day, perspectives and colors shift, presenting breathtaking birds- and childs-eye views of sunrises and sunsets, scuttling prey, the childrens neighborhood, and more. The second-person text, rhythmic, alliterative and suspenseful, compares the humans to hawks (High in a backyard cedar they sit. / High from the window you watch). Hand-lettered sound effects (Keee-EEER, Keee-EEER) contrast with the spiky, serious typeface and further link the visual and textual story lines. A squirrels demise places the narrative firmly in the real world; and facts about hawks, provided alongside a bibliography and additional resources in the back matter, invite readers to watch for birds of prey in their own neighborhoods: Whether you live in the country, the city, or the suburbs, you too can spot a red-tailed hawk! Visually stunning and informative. elisa gall (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
As the sun rises, Father Hawk stretches his wings. At the same time, two children wake, stretching their arms and watching as the family of red-tailed hawks go about their day. As Mother Hawk stays with the chicks, Father Hawk perches on a pole and searches for prey. Over the course of the day, he makes several failed attempts at catching prey, and the children watch as he is mobbed by crows. Eventually, as the day ends, he succeeds, carrying a squirrel back to his hungry young. Back matter provides more information on the lifestyle and habitats of the ubiquitous red-tailed hawk, and the second-person narration adds a human element as the binocular-gripping siblings follow the hawk throughout his day. The detailed illustrations provide both at-a-distance and close-up looks, while some, such as the one where the hawk finally makes his kill, are not for the faint of heart. A matter-of-fact examination of a day in the life of a creature that many readers may find familiar.--Reagan, Maggie Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A HUMAN CORPSE becomes fertile loam for gentle grasses. Bees do little dances for one another that communicate detailed topographies. The oil from whales formed part of the nitroglycerine explosives used in World War II. The magnetic polarity of the earth totally reverses every once in a while, too, we may as well add. The most basic consequences of the facts of our natural world can read as far more magical than any spirit or bending spoon, save we so rarely see nature in that way - for what it is. These four new picture books that focus on nature don't just instill wonder, they renew it. Each one, in telling a relatively straight story of the natural world, reminds us of how much wilder nature is even than our loopiest imaginings. In THE HONEYBEE (ATHENEUM, 48 PR, $17.99; ages 4 to 8), the author Kirsten Hall ("The Jacket") teams up with the gently magnificent illustrator Isabelle Arsenault ("Cloth Lullaby," "Colette's Lost Pet") to bring readers the story of one year, from spring to spring, with the honeybees of a single hive. Hall's charming text proceeds in lightly cadenced lines that mostly rhyme: "Come now, Rest. Join our nest. Huddle and cuddle, the winter's our test." Arsenault's illustrations capture something of the alien vision of bees - bees see a "bee purple" in flowers that is invisible to us - through a neon orange that she uses sparingly amid paler gouache, pencil and ink landscapes. Her flowers and grasses are drawn impressionistically, while the bees themselves are made more emotionally legible with cartoonish eyes and even smiles. Children will love tracing the erratic paths of the honeybees, and come away with a not too distorted sense of the little honey factory inside the unprepossessing, and previously terrifying, hive. The hexagons of honeycomb, as drawn by Arsenault, seem so perfect as to be fanciful precisely when they are fact. HAWK RISING (ROARING BROOK, 48 PP. $18.99; ages 4 to 9), with words by Maria Gianferrari ("Coyote Moon") and illustrations by the Caldecott medalist Brian Floca ("Locomotive," "Princess Cora and the Crocodile"), has a more naturalistic tone, even as the awesomeness of the central bird of prey makes the book read intensely, in the manner of a ghost story. The reader of "Hawk Rising" is set in alliance with two sisters who are watching a father hawk nested near their home. Over the course of the day, he needs to find food for the three hungry chicks in his nest. The prose is not cute, but instead informative and painterly: "Black talons curving onto wood. Hooked beak, sharp as a knife. Head turning. Eyes searching. Chicks waiting." Gianferrari admirably doesn't shy away from precise language, which a child loves to have at hand perhaps even more than an adult does: The hawk doesn't just fly and attack, he rides the wind "like a wave, twisting and turning, kiting and floating." Children's stories about predators generally either choose to make the predator a villain, or to somehow obscure the predator's way of life. "Hawk Rising" does something more honest and more interesting - it simply watches. We see the father hawk failing to get a chipmunk, then harried by crows, then failing to catch sparrows. We see the claws of the hawk up close from the prey's perspective, and we also see the hawk's hungry chicks. Finally the hawk, spotting a squirrel - a squirrel lovingly detailed in a full-spread Audubon-like drawing - succeeds in catching its prey. The expression Floca puts on the watching younger sister's face is wonderfully ambivalent as we see her watching the father hawk fly off, the squirrel in his talons silhouetted against "the navy-blue sky." The story's final move draws attention to the uneasy unity between the humans and the hawks. "Through the night, safe in your nests, you and the Hawk family sleep." HEARTBEAT (ATHENEUM, 56 PR, $17.99; AGES 4 to 8), written and illustrated by Evan Turk ("Muddy"; "The Storyteller"), also focuses tightly on one species: whales. "Heartbeat," however, finds its throughline across time and taxonomy, linking whales and humans through the centuries. The illustrations tell most of this story, while the spare, incantatory prose mostly sets the tone. We see a fetal whale's heart beating near its pregnant mother's. The baby is born, but soon the mother is speared, though this is presented somewhat abstractly, through intrusions of harsh white. The mother's body rises and then becomes a light, then a hundred lights, a million lights, then part of war, eventually even part of mankind's exploration of space. Meanwhile the baby whale longs for its mother. Near the end of the book a young girl at the prow of a ship sees the surviving whale, older now. In sync with the whale's heartbeat and song, she is moved to promise to protect the one ocean, one sea, one song. Turk's intense color palette throughout is mostly inky purples and carmines, interrupted by white cut-outs. You leave this book with the sense of having overheard an unsettling but beautiful lullaby. THE FOREST (ENCHANTED LION, 72 PR, $25.95; ages 4 and up), with words by Ricardo Bozzi (translated from the Italian by Debbie Bibo) and illustrated by Violeta Lopiz and Valerio Viðali, follows the metaphorical associations of a story of nature even farther. This is an essentially existential children's book, which imagines human life itself as an exploration through that famed and sometimes dark forest in which we have often been said to find ourselves. Like pretty much every title published by the small, independent Enchanted Lion books, it is a gorgeous, singular, unimprovable book. The story starts: "It is an enormous, ancient forest that has not yet been fully explored." Inside, a series of bas-reliefs and cut-outs on plain paper shows us first a baby, then a young child... and on through to an old, wrinkled face that eventually yields, becoming lines in a landscape from which new greenery grows. Between the images of a human aging, we see forests, jungles and fields, with animals and humans making their way, sometimes alone, sometimes in a group. Somehow "The Forest" is a work of art that escapes feeling like an "art object" - it succeeds in being for children. The ink on its mylar dust jacket makes a distinctively beautiful sound. The eye-holes and occasional unfoldings alter a reader's sense of space. "It is said that the forest has a certain limit if you look straight ahead, but the sides are boundless." This book takes on even death: "At the end of the climb there is a ravine into which each explorer will eventually fall, despite the precautions taken and the advancements of science." This fall didn't bother my 4-year-old at all. She took interest in the new seedlings, the disappearance of the textured pages, and the return of the pines. RIVKA GALCHEN'S most recent book is "Little Labors."
School Library Journal Review
Gr 1-5-A young unnamed girl observes a father hawk searching for prey to feed his young offspring. Against the morning sky, the bird sits on a pole watching and waiting, until he sees a chipmunk below and dives after it. But the chipmunk escapes. The child continues to watch as the bird embarks on a number of unsuccessful endeavors, including trying to catch a sparrow. As the day sinks toward darkness, the father hawk perches once again to wait and watch-finally, he catches a squirrel. Bird and human rest as the night closes in. The lyrical text captures the excitement of observing red-tailed hawks' hunting efforts in a residential setting. Floca's stunningly accurate watercolor illustrations beautifully complement Gianferrari's text. An incredible companion to the author's Coyote Moon, this latest powerfully demonstrates the wonder that can be found in observing the natural world. Additional information about red-tailed hawks makes the book a valuable educational tool, as well. -VERDICT A first purchase for most libraries.-Heidi Grange, Summit Elementary School, Smithfield, UT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
A male red-tailed hawk leaves a nest full of hatchlings to scout a suburban neighborhood for prey.Similar in tone, setting, and general course to Gianferrari's Coyote Moon, illustrated by Bagram Ibatoulline (2016), the hawk's hunt extends from sunrise to twilight as stretches of "kiting" or "perch-hunting" from atop a utility pole are punctuated by sudden--and, twice, unsuccessful--dives at small creatures, with a mobbing by crows between. Though subject to obtrusively poetic flights ("Dandelions ripple. / Oaks tremble. / Father Hawk perches / and searches"; and, more obscurely, two references to "Mars" rising "red in the sky"), the terse narrative vividly captures both the weary vigil's length and its abrupt moments of mortal drama. Also, even though the text positions readers as "you," one of a pair of brown-skinned siblings who watch from their porch and yard, the narrative is free of anthropomorphic language. Alternating the perspective from ground level to high overhead, Floca depicts the majestic raptor with painterly magnificence, giving its variegated plumage a soft, even shaggy look that renders the climactic flashes of its massive black talons positively electrifying. The hunt finally comes to a decisive but gore-free culmination with the hawk "grabbing" a squirrel and winging off to the nearby nest. The author closes with two pages of additional facts and leads to further information.An absorbing reminder that we need never look far to see wild, beautiful nature. (Informational picture book. 6-9)