cover image Volcano Wakes Up!

Volcano Wakes Up!

Lisa Westberg Peters, , illus. by Steve Jenkins. . Holt, $16.99 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-8050-8287-6

Personified features of a Hawaiian landscape speak in verse during a day in the life of a waking volcano, rendered in Jenkins’s atmospheric trademark cut-paper collages. The poems shift between the volcano, a pair of crickets, ferns, the sun, and a winding mountain road, and Peters lends sly dimensions to each voice: the volcano is a literal firecracker (“I’m the baby.... but when I wake up, watch out! ”), and the crickets’ chirps are transmuted into texts (“Hey, bro, I M way back in the cave. I was ZZZZZZ hard, but that nasty smll woke me up”). A humorous, imaginative, and artful concept. Ages 4–up. (Mar.)