Rating: WORTHY!
From an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.
I cannot for the life of me understand why any publisher would want to release this in a Kindle version, not even just for review. If there's one thing that Amazon's crappy Kindle conversion process does with utter reliability, it's that it totally mangles anything that's not plain vanilla text. This is one of many reasons I refuse to do business with Amazon. The Kindle version was chopped, shredded, julienned, and sliced and diced until the story was out of order and made no sense. Even on a iPad, the images were reliably out of order and sliced in half, and not vertical so they would have at least followed the pagination, but horizontally, so it was impossible to read.
Fortunately I have more than one reader app option, and in both Adobe Digital Editions and Bluefire Reader, the book was beautiful: colorful, the illustrations charming, the text brief but informative, and the story well done. The story, written by Nederlander Judith Koppens, and Andy Engel, and illustrated by Nynke Mare Talsma, whose middle name appropriately means 'sea', is of course, the appalling amount of plastic that's in use today, far too much of which gets into the ocean.
It not only gets there in the form of bags and bottles and other large items, it also gets there - and this understandably isn't covered in this story - in the form of micro plastics, some of which is even now probably in the table salt you have in your kitchen. It's a disgrace, a menace, and a health hazard for every living thing, and everything we can do to educate and warn about this is to be commended, which is why I commend this as a worthy and educational read.
