Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature's Survivors
by Joyce Sidman, illustrated by Beckie Prange, 2010. New York: Houghton Mifflin Books for Children. (978061871794).

Author Website: www.joycesidman.com

Illustrator Website: http://www.beckieprange.com/

Media: linocuts, hand-painted with watercolor

Awards and Honors: Starred reviews in Booklist, Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, Kirkus, Horn Book; Junior Library Guild Selection; Publisher's Weekly, Best Books of the Year; Washington Post, Best Books of the Year; Kirkus, Best Books of the Year; School Library Journal, Best Books of the Year; National Science Teachers Association/Children's Book Council, Outstanding Science Trade Books, K-12, 2011; Boston Globe, Top Ten Children's Books of 2010; New York Public Library's "100 Best Books"; Booklist, Top 10 Sci-Tech for Youth; Book Links, Lasting Connections for 2010; Finalist for the 2011 CYBILS Poetry Award; Association for Library Service to Children Notable Children's Book; The John Burroughs List of Nature Books for Young Readers


Annotation:
Joyce Sidman's poetic tribute to some species that have been spectacularly successful from an evolutionary point of view. 
 
Personal Reaction/Discussion of Artwork:
     Joyce Sidman is a master of using poetry to teach children about science and nature. In Ubiquitous her compelling verses, paired with Beckie Prange's illustrations, tell the story of some of Earth's most successful species. 

     Prange's lovely hand-colored linocut prints are gorgeously composed and bold while still retaining a charming rawness. Her illustrations exhibit so much variety that they keep a real energy about the book. One page may show the moon as seen from the perspective of someone laying in the grass, while another presents lichens, seven times their actual size, spreading gracefully across the page, and yet another shows the lifecycle of the dung beetle as a circle of spheres on a blank white page. The endpapers in particular are really spectacular- Prange has created a timeline to show when the various lifeforms appeared on Earth using a string 46 meters long, coiled and looped, each centimeter equalling 1 million years. The string gently shifts in color, from red to orange to yellow, and through the colors of the rainbow, to represent changes in the Earth's geologic periods. Of the fourteen species represented on the timeline only one, bacteria,  appears on the left hand side of the spread. The other thirteen are bunched up towards the end of the timeline, and humans appear at the very tip of the string. It's an effective way to visually represent how young humans really are as a species. 

     Sidman's poems are as delightfully varied in form as the species they discuss. They range from a rapid-fire stream of consciousness rant by a squirrel, to a classical ode on a mollusk's shell, to a poem about sharks in the shape of (what else?) a shark. Opposite each poem is a short factual paragraph about each species, explaining the special characteristics that have made them successful on Earth. As with Sidman's other works, you're never quite sure if this is a book of poems masquerading as science, or an informational volume dressed up as art. Ubiquitous is an visually arresting, inventive, and sometimes whimsical blurring of the division between art and science.

Allusion: "... I am Sheath-wing, beloved of ancients... As the sun-god rolls his blazing disk overhead, so I roll my perfect sphere of dung across the sands... Blessed by the gods are you who hold me in your hands."
 - refers to the worship of the dung, or scarab, beetle by ancient Egyptians and the parallels drawn between the beetle and the sun god, Ra

Personification:
"Did you know/ dandelions grow the hair/ just as we do?/ Each pale, silky thread/ springs straight/ from their head./ They were all blondes,/ of course,/ and each one/ a star."

Curriculum Connection:Elementary school science- Biology