  | Full Text Reviews: School Library Journal - 03/01/2014 K-Gr 3—At six o'clock in the morning in Dakar, Senegal, Keita helps his father count the fish caught during night. So begins a tale of events happening at the same moment all around the world. From the Greenwich meridian eastward, full circle back to Senegal, Perrin takes readers on a voyage of events in 24 time zones where children are conducting their everyday activities. Mitko, in Bulgaria, chases after the school bus; Chen, in Shanghai, practices for the Lunar New Year parade at 2:00; and Pablo, in Mexico City, is having magical dreams at midnight. Each hour presents a unique cultural experience of normalcy in the lives of children and their families. Stunning, digitally enhanced ink illustrations depict the variety of landscapes, architecture, clothing, and customs of a diverse world, yet all portray what is recognizably the same in all children's lives. A large, pull-out world map reveals each time zone and the children shown in the story. A lovely addition to a study of time zones or an exploration of cultural diversity—Carol Connor, Cincinnati Public Schools, OH - Copyright 2014 Publishers Weekly, Library Journal and/or School Library Journal used with permission. Bulletin for the Center... - 04/01/2014 This French import offers a time-zone-demarcated view of the world, with each page showing a slice of kid life in a different time zone and proceeding eastward by a time zone. Events open at 6 a.m. in Senegal (GMT/UTC zone 0), where a boy helps his father with the morning fish catch, and then move to Paris at 7 a.m. (GMT zone +1), where “Benedict drinks hot chocolate before school,” and so on, traveling across the globe, zipping north and south, stopping in islands and jungles, to get representatives from every time zone. The brief views and one-line summaries are, not surprisingly, a little reductive at times, but the point about simultaneity and difference is effectively made. The book’s format of tall, narrow pages tacitly echoes the divisions of the time zones, and there’s cunning craftsmanship in the soft pencil and digital illustrations, with recurring motifs (a foxy little dog, a flying white bird) and visual rhyming (a sprinkling of rain in New Caledonia across from a flurry of snow in Russia) connecting the atmospheric bijou scenes. The book’s decision to ignore the International Date Line, though, ends up suggesting a continuum that doesn’t actually exist, and one or two other locations are unclear and even questionable; more unfortunately, since the book’s initial publication in 2011, Western Samoa has moved time zones from the zone it appears in here. Even that development could provoke an interesting leadoff discussion, though, and this introduces a concept that’s a real eye-opener for kids both technically and culturally. A foldout world map regrettably lacks demarcation of the actual zones but maps the rough locations of the subject kids. Pair this with Marilyn Singer’s Nine O’Clock Lullaby or Vyner’s World Team (BCCB 5/02) for another look at the same day in different places. DS - Copyright 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Loading...
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